The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V as Ashiya Doman in the Play Kikyo-zome Onna Urakata, Performed at the Morita Theater in the Seventh Month, 1776

Katsukawa Shunsho records Ichikawa Danjuro V as the magician Ashiya Doman in the seventh-month 1776 Morita Theater staging of Kikyo-zome Onna Urakata. Ashiya Doman, a sorcerer figure rooted in Heian-era legend who appears repeatedly in noh, joruri, and kabuki, gave Danjuro V (1741-1806) an opportunity to deploy the aragoto bravura that the Ichikawa line had cultivated since the late seventeenth century. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the print presents the actor isolated against an unprinted ground in the Katsukawa manner, the costume pattern and the angle of the body carrying the menace of the role. Danjuro V was the leading actor of his generation, and any Shunsho print bearing his likeness functioned both as commercial souvenir and as a primary visual document of Edo kabuki at its eighteenth-century peak. Katsukawa school yakusha-e are the principal surviving record of these performances, and Shunsho's portrait method, observed facial features, attentive costume rendering, and economical composition, set the conventions under which the genre operated for the remainder of the century. By 1776 Shunsho was the dominant designer of actor prints in Edo, and his studio was beginning to produce the pupils, including Shunko and Shun'ei, who would extend the master's manner into the next generation.