Actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V as the Monk Wantetsu

Katsukawa Shunsho's hosoban portrait of Ichikawa Danjuro V in the role of the monk Wantetsu shows the Edo stage's foremost aragoto star in a part requiring strong physical presence and partial religious dress. The Katsukawa school under Shunsho had by the late 1770s and early 1780s become the dominant force in Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e, displacing the generic Torii poster style in favour of identifiable individual likeness. Danjuro V was the most prominent subject of this new manner: head of the Ichikawa lineage, leading exponent of the family's heroic aragoto roles, and a figure whose features were instantly recognisable to Edo audiences. In this print Shunsho captures the actor in the robes of an itinerant monk while preserving the broad, strongly modelled facial features that identify him to viewers familiar with his appearances. The plain background concentrates attention on the figure, the colour clean and the contour firm, in the manner that the Katsukawa school used to give actor portraiture both a documentary and a portable, decorative function. The print is held in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. It exemplifies the way late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e treated kabuki performers as celebrities whose individual personalities, not merely their stage types, deserved careful visual record.