The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo II as Hiranoya Tokubei (?) in the Play Wada Sakamori Eiga Kagami (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Third Month, 1773 (?)

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, this Katsukawa Shunsho actor print pictures Ichikawa Yaozo II as the merchant Hiranoya Tokubei, a role from the third-month 1773 Nakamura Theater staging of Wada Sakamori Eiga Kagami. The young Yaozo II was a leading member of the Ichikawa line during the 1770s, and Shunsho's depiction draws his features with the granular specificity that distinguished Katsukawa school yakusha-e from earlier, more generalized portraiture in Edo ukiyo-e. The merchant character, identifiable through costume rather than the broader bombast of warrior or villain roles, gave Shunsho an opportunity to record posture and facial restraint, the qualities that Edo audiences prized in nuanced character acting. The ground is left unprinted, a Katsukawa convention that throws full visual emphasis onto the figure. Shunsho was the dominant force in late eighteenth-century yakusha-e, and prints like this fed a robust commercial market in which Edo theatergoers collected images of admired performances much as later audiences would collect playbills or photographs. The catalog's tentative attribution of an earlier date (1768) alongside the specific 1773 performance title reflects the recurrent scholarly problem of pinning undated Katsukawa designs to verified theatrical events; the print is accepted as a record of the 1773 production. The image belongs to the Clarence Buckingham Collection, one of the foundational American collections of Edo ukiyo-e, and its inclusion attests to the centrality of Shunsho's actor portraits in any serious survey of Katsukawa school printmaking.