The Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV in the Hanagasa Dance in the Play Iromi-gusa Shiki no Somewake, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Ninth Month, 1781

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1781, this Katsukawa Shunjō [hosoban](/glossary/hosoban) print depicts the actor Iwai Hanshirō IV performing the Hanagasa Dance (flower-hat dance) in the play Iromi-gusa Shiki no Somewake, staged at the Nakamura Theater in the ninth month of 1781. Iwai Hanshirō IV (1747–1800) was a leading onnagata (female-role specialist) of the Tenmei era, second only to Segawa Kikunojō III in the period's onnagata hierarchy and a frequent subject of Katsukawa-school portraits. The Hanagasa Dance is a recurring Edo theatrical dance interlude in which a single performer moves through a sequence of choreographed poses while manipulating a hanagasa, the conical flower-decorated straw hat that gives the dance its name. Dance pieces of this kind — relatively short interludes embedded in or appended to the main dramatic action — were a defining feature of the Edo kabuki program, and they generated a substantial subset of the actor-print corpus: the format invited the designer to depict a single figure mid-pose in a stylized, almost iconic stance, the sort of compositionally tight design that the Katsukawa hosoban was built to deliver. The ninth-month performance places the production within the late-summer theatrical season at the Nakamura-za, one of the three licensed Edo theaters. Shunjō's design follows the standard Katsukawa formula: a single full-figure actor in dance costume, identified by likeness and mon (family crest), with the play title, role, theater, and performance month recorded in cartouche.