The Actor Nakajima Mihoemon II as Bomon no Saisho Kiyotada in the Play Oyafune Taiheiki, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1775

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e portrays Nakajima Mihoemon II in the role of Bomon no Saisho Kiyotada from the play Oyafune Taiheiki, staged at the Ichimura Theater in the eleventh month of 1775. The print belongs to the body of Edo ukiyo-e actor portraiture for which Shunsho is best remembered, an output that fundamentally reshaped how kabuki performers were represented on paper. Working in the early 1770s and into the 1780s, the artist replaced the generic, mask-like physiognomies of earlier Torii school posters with carefully observed individual faces, lending each actor a recognisable identity grounded in close study of the stage. Mihoemon was a specialist in dignified male roles, and Shunsho's restrained composition concentrates attention on the carriage of the costume and the set of the features. The Katsukawa school that he led with his pupils, including Shunko, Shunjo and eventually Shunei, dominated the yakusha-e market of late eighteenth-century Edo. Their hosoban prints, narrow vertical sheets ideal for single-figure portraits, became standard collector's items among kabuki devotees. This sheet is preserved in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the principal American repository of Shunsho material, where its documentary value lies in fixing a specific performance, role and theatre in the visual record of Edo's theatre district. As such it is both a work of portrait art and an irreplaceable piece of evidence for the cultural history of kabuki at the end of the An'ei era.