The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo II as Yoshimine no Munesada in the Play Kuni no Hana Ono no Itsumoji, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1771

Katsukawa Shunsho depicts Ichikawa Yaozo II in the role of Yoshimine no Munesada, drawn from the eleventh-month 1771 face-showing performance of Kuni no Hana Ono no Itsumoji at the Nakamura Theater. Munesada was a historical Heian courtier and poet who later took monastic vows as Henjo, one of the rokkasen or six poetic immortals, and kabuki repeatedly recast his story for the stage. Shunsho's design uses the isolated single-figure format that the Katsukawa school had refined: figure on unprinted ground, costume pattern rendered with attention to drape, face individuated to the actor rather than generalized to the role type. Yaozo II was a leading member of the Ichikawa line during the 1770s, and the print records his particular interpretation in a way that no other medium of the period could approach. The Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e genre, as Shunsho conceived it, produced not idealized types but documentary portraits, and that commitment is why prints of this kind have remained the principal visual record of Edo kabuki down to the present. The image is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, part of the Clarence Buckingham Collection on which much modern scholarship of Katsukawa school printmaking rests. The kaomise production for which this print was made was the most consequential of the kabuki year, the moment when theaters unveiled their newly contracted troupes, and Shunsho's prints capitalized on the seasonal demand for collectible commemorations of those debuts.