The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku II as Naoe in the Play Tsuma Mukae Koshiji no Fumizuki, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eighth Month, 1780

Katsukawa Shunsho here portrays Yamashita Kinsaku II as the female character Naoe in Tsuma Mukae Koshiji no Fumizuki, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eighth month of 1780. Yamashita Kinsaku II was one of the principal onnagata of the Edo stage in this period, and the eighth-month programme placed him in a domestic-romantic role that called for restrained emotional projection. Shunsho's yakusha-e treats the figure in the hallmark Katsukawa school manner: full-length on a narrow hosoban sheet, the body forming an elegant vertical line, the kosode rendered in clear flat colour with patterned details carefully indicated. The face is drawn with the individuality that distinguished Edo ukiyo-e portraiture under Shunsho from the more generic conventions of the earlier Torii school. The print belongs to the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like the bulk of Shunsho's surviving output, it functioned originally as a commercial print sold around the time of the production it commemorates, its appeal a combination of recognisable likeness, fashionable costume and association with a famous play. Such prints constitute much of what we know about the casting and visual conventions of late eighteenth-century kabuki, and they remain the foundation of the Katsukawa school's contribution to Japanese art: a body of carefully observed theatre portraiture that shaped the practice of yakusha-e for the rest of the Edo period.