Ichikawa Monnosuke II as a Lord in Formal Dress

Dated 1789 and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art, this Katsukawa Shunkō print depicts Ichikawa Monnosuke II as a lord in formal dress. The companion to other Cleveland Monnosuke II portraits in the same collection, this print captures the actor in another lordly role with elaborate formal kimono and the imposing bearing required of high-ranking court characters. The 1789 date places this work in Shunkō's last fully productive year before his stroke, and the print displays his draftsmanship at its peak: confident outlines, finely observed facial features, and the kind of subtle posture-adjustments that distinguished one actor's portrayal from another's. By 1789 Shunkō had been designing actor prints for nearly two decades, and his accumulated knowledge of Monnosuke II's career, role-range, and physiognomy gave his late portraits of the actor an exceptional precision. The print also belongs to the moment when the Katsukawa school was beginning to experiment with the large-head ōkubi-e format that would soon transform Edo actor portraiture — though this particular work remains in the full-figure tradition. The Cleveland Museum of Art's holdings of multiple 1789-dated Shunkō prints make it possible to study the artist's working methods at a single intense moment in his career.