The Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu II in an Unidentified Role

This Katsukawa Shunsho hosoban yakusha-e depicts the actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu II in an unidentified role. Sanogawa Ichimatsu II belonged to the line of male kabuki performers established by Sanogawa Ichimatsu I, whose distinctive checkered kimono pattern, the so-called ichimatsu pattern, gave its name to a perennial textile design in Japan. Without a securely identifying cartouche or matching theatre records, the specific role here cannot be confirmed, but Shunsho's image is unmistakable as a Katsukawa school design: full-length figure on a narrow vertical sheet, individualised facial features, plain background, and the firm contour and disciplined colour that characterise the artist's mature manner. As founder of the Katsukawa school and the dominant figure in Edo ukiyo-e actor portraiture during the An'ei and Tenmei eras, Shunsho produced enormous numbers of such hosoban portraits, often in pairs or sets that recorded the casting of contemporary kabuki productions. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression, with its image made accessible through ukiyo-e.org. As a Shunsho portrait it remains characteristic of the wider corpus the Katsukawa school produced in late eighteenth-century Edo: a careful, individualised visual record of a specific player, contributing to the broader documentation of the city's theatrical life even where the specific role and production have since been lost.