The Actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II as Shinokobe Shoji Yukihira in the Play Gohiiki Kanjincho, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1773

Katsukawa Shunsho's yakusha-e portrays Ichikawa Monnosuke II as Shinokobe Shoji Yukihira in 'Gohiiki Kanjincho,' a production at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month of 1773. The play's title invokes the famous 'Kanjincho' subscription scroll narrative, in which the warrior Yoshitsune and his retainer Benkei pass through a barrier guard by performing a forged temple-fundraising appeal; the Edo kabuki tradition built numerous variations on this material, and 'Gohiiki Kanjincho' is one of the early plays in the lineage that culminates in the later canonical version of the play. Ichikawa Monnosuke II was an actor known for serious samurai roles, and Shunsho captures him with a measured, dignified bearing appropriate to the Shinokobe Shoji Yukihira character. The design is a representative Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e of the Katsukawa school's high period, in which precise physiognomic likeness, careful costume detail, and theater-specific documentary anchoring combined into a single mature genre. The eleventh-month kaomise slot at the Nakamura Theater was the most prestigious programming opportunity of the Edo theatrical calendar, and prints of these performances by Katsukawa school designers were both immediate fan objects and long-term collectible documents. The impression is held by the Art Institute of Chicago, whose deep Katsukawa school holdings continue to support both connoisseurship and historical reconstruction of late eighteenth-century Edo kabuki careers and repertoires.