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 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.