The Actors Ichikawa Yaozo II as Konoshita Hyokichi (?) (right), and Sakata Hangoro II as Matsunaga Daizen Hisahide (?) (left), in the Play Gion Sairei Shinko Ki (?), Perfomred at the Ichimura Theater (?) in the Fifth Month, 1775 (?)

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e, dated to around 1770 and tentatively associated with Gion Sairei Shinko Ki at the Ichimura Theater, pairs Ichikawa Yaozo II as Konoshita Hyokichi with Sakata Hangoro II as the historical villain Matsunaga Daizen Hisahide. The play dramatizes the political turmoil surrounding Matsunaga's career as a sixteenth-century daimyo notorious for treachery, and the role of Daizen, with its dramatic mie and grand declamatory speeches, became a vehicle for major katakiyaku, or villain, specialists across generations of Edo kabuki. Shunsho stages the two actors in confrontation, balancing Yaozo II's more agile bearing on the right against Hangoro II's heavier, more grounded villain posture on the left. The facial features of each performer are individualized in the manner that defined Katsukawa school yakusha-e and that distinguished Shunsho's compositions from the generic conventions of the earlier Torii school. As founder of the Katsukawa school, Shunsho effectively defined the visual vocabulary of late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e kabuki portraiture, and his pupils Shunko, Shunei, and the young Hokusai trained under his methods. This impression is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago. The print contributes to ongoing reconstruction of Ichimura Theater programming and to the broader documentary corpus of mid-1770s kabuki, much of which now survives only through the actor prints produced by Shunsho's prolific Katsukawa workshop.