The Actor Ichikawa Ebizo III as Matsuo-maru in the Play Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Seventh Month, 1776

This Katsukawa Shunsho print, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows Ichikawa Ebizo III as Matsuo-maru in Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami ("Sugawara's Secrets of Calligraphy"), staged at the Ichimura Theater in the seventh month of 1776. Sugawara is one of the three great history plays of the kabuki repertory, and the role of Matsuo-maru, eldest of three triplet brothers torn between loyalty to rival masters, was reserved for the most accomplished tachiyaku, or leading male actor. Ebizo III, a member of the dominant Ichikawa line, is portrayed here in the costume associated with the role's celebrated Terakoya "village schoolhouse" scene, in which Matsuo sacrifices his own son. Shunsho's compositional sense, central to the Katsukawa school's reform of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e, isolates the figure against a flat ground so that the audience reads costume, posture, and expression as a unit. The grayed grounds, narrow color range, and incisive black outline are all hallmarks of Shunsho's mature manner, and the actor's downcast eyes and tight jaw convey the role's suppressed grief. Where earlier Torii-school actor prints flattened all faces into generic masks, Shunsho gave each player a usable likeness, an innovation that established yakusha-e as a portrait genre and that his pupils, including the young Hokusai, would carry forward. The sheet stands as a primary document of a specific 1776 Edo kabuki production and as a vivid sample of the Katsukawa house style at its peak.