The Actor Onoe Matsusuke

Katsukawa Shunsho's portrait of the actor Onoe Matsusuke belongs to the Edo ukiyo-e tradition of yakusha-e that Shunsho effectively reinvented from the early 1770s onward. Where the older Torii school had produced standardised promotional images in which actors were largely interchangeable, Shunsho and his Katsukawa school pupils insisted on individual likeness, observing the particular face, build and stage manner of each performer. Onoe Matsusuke I was a celebrated specialist in supernatural roles and dignified older parts on the Edo stage, and Shunsho returned to him repeatedly across the 1770s and 1780s. In this hosoban-format sheet the actor is presented in costume against a plain ground, the figure shaped by clean outline and flat areas of colour characteristic of full nishiki-e colour printing as it matured under designers such as Suzuki Harunobu and Isoda Koryusai before being extended to actor subjects by Shunsho. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds the impression, one of a substantial collection of Katsukawa school prints that document the late eighteenth-century kabuki world. The image illustrates Shunsho's central contribution to Edo ukiyo-e: the conviction that the visual record of the theatre should preserve specific persons rather than archetypes, a principle that shaped every major actor-portraitist who followed him, from his pupil Shunko through Shun'ei and ultimately to Toshusai Sharaku and Utagawa Toyokuni.