The Actor Otani Oniji III in an Unidentified Role in the Play Yukimi-zuki Eiga Hachi no Ki (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Eleventh Month, 1787 (?)

Otani Oniji III, an actor whose name later became famous through Sharaku's celebrated portrait of him as the villain Edobei in 1794, here appears in a hosoban print by Shun'ei in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1787 and showing the actor in the eleventh-month Nakamura Theater production of Yukimi-zuki Eiga Hachi no Ki. The play, drawing on the legendary tale of Saimyōji Tokiyori and the impoverished retainer Sano Tsuneyo who burned his potted plants to warm the unrecognized lord, was a staple of the Edo kabuki season. Shun'ei's portrait — rendered seven years before Sharaku's more famous image of the same actor — provides a fascinating comparative document of how a single performer was visually constructed by different artists. Shun'ei's depiction maintains the somewhat more conventional Katsukawa-school nigao-e idiom, observed and individualized but contained within the school's stylistic register, whereas Sharaku would push the same face toward expressionistic intensity. Together, prints like this one trace the visual evolution of Edo actor portraiture during one of its most inventive decades.