The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo III as Kusunoki Uraminosuke Disguised as a Male Fox from Tsukamoto (?), in the Play Kumoi no Hana Yoshino no Wakamusha (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Eleventh Month, 1786 (?)

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, captures the actor Ichikawa Yaozo III in the elaborate transformation role of Kusunoki Uraminosuke disguised as a male fox from Tsukamoto, a tour-de-force performance from the play Kumoi no Hana Yoshino no Wakamusha staged at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month of 1786. As a foundational designer of late Edo ukiyo-e and the founder of the Katsukawa school, Shunsho specialized in capturing kabuki performers as recognizable individuals rather than generic stage types, a revolution that reshaped the entire actor-print genre. The composition centers the figure in a moment of supernatural disguise, with the costume's patterns and the actor's distinctive facial features rendered through the school's signature combination of fine line work and carefully balanced color blocks. Yaozo III was among the major performers whose careers Shunsho documented across the 1770s and 1780s, and prints such as this functioned as commemorative records sold to theatergoers who had attended the production or to admirers collecting the season's notable roles. The transformation premise, blending samurai loyalty narratives with the imagery of shape-shifting foxes drawn from Japanese folklore, gave Shunsho the opportunity to combine human portraiture with the iconography of the supernatural, a hallmark theme of the Katsukawa school's stage subjects. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the sheet as part of its substantial holdings of eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, where the design illustrates how Shunsho's likeness-based approach gave kabuki prints their lasting documentary and artistic value.