The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo III as Oboshi Yuranosuke in the Play Kanadehon Chushingura, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Fifth Month, 1786

Katsukawa Shunsho here depicts Ichikawa Yaozo III as Oboshi Yuranosuke, the principal samurai leader of the avenging band in Kanadehon Chushingura, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the fifth month of 1786. The Chushingura cycle, dramatising the historical revenge of the forty-seven ronin, was the most enduringly popular subject of the kabuki repertoire, and any production of it was a major event in Edo. Shunsho was by this date the dominant Edo ukiyo-e designer of yakusha-e, and his Katsukawa school portraits of Chushingura roles were prized by collectors who attended performances and wanted a likeness of their preferred player in a celebrated part. Yuranosuke is a role of grave responsibility and dissimulation: the loyal retainer who outwardly behaves with debauched frivolity in order to deceive enemy spies, all the while plotting vengeance. Shunsho's portrait registers this dual character through restrained posture and a directed gaze rather than through theatrical exaggeration. Such psychological inflection was the hallmark that distinguished Katsukawa school portraiture from the older Torii tradition. The print is part of the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, an archive that preserves a particularly rich record of late eighteenth-century Edo kabuki through Shunsho's pupils and contemporaries. As a documentary object it records a specific casting at a specific theatre during a specific run; as an aesthetic object it shows the mature artist working in the firmly established hosoban single-actor format.