The Actor Nakamura Matsue I as Kasaya Sankatsu (?) in the Play Hana no Gosho Konegen Butai (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Eighth Month, 1772 (?)

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e records Nakamura Matsue I, an onnagata of the Nakamura acting line, in the role of Kasaya Sankatsu from the eighth-month 1772 Nakamura Theater staging of Hana no Gosho Konegen Butai. Sankatsu was a stock female role in Edo kabuki, often a tragic heroine, and Shunsho's design treats Matsue's portrayal with the careful individuation that defined the Katsukawa school's contribution to Edo ukiyo-e. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the print belongs to the period when Shunsho was the unrivaled designer of actor prints in Edo and his pupils, the future Shunko, Shun'ei, and Hokusai among them, were absorbing his approach. The eighth-month productions sat between the early-spring vendetta plays and the eleventh-month kaomise debuts, and they tended to feature mid-season dramas with strong romantic plots, the kind of material in which an onnagata of Matsue's skill could shine. Shunsho records the figure isolated against an unprinted ground, the wig and kimono pattern marking the female role and the facial features marking the individual performer beneath. The catalog's tentative early date of 1767 reflects the difficulty of dating undated Katsukawa designs precisely; the 1772 title in the work itself situates the production. As a yakusha-e, the print served Edo theatergoers as a commemorative record and modern scholars as the principal visual archive of Matsue's performance.