The Actors Segawa Kikunojo III as Aigo no Waka (right), and Ichikawa Yaozo II as Hachio-maru Aratora (left), in the Play Chigo Sakura Jusan Kane, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1774

Documented through ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago, this Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e pairs Segawa Kikunojo III as Aigo no Waka (right) with Ichikawa Yaozo II as Hachio-maru Aratora (left) in Chigo Sakura Jusan Kane (The Temple-Page Cherry and the Thirteenth Bell), performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1774. Aigo no Waka belongs to the chigo theme — beautiful temple-page boys whose tragic stories form an enduring strand of kabuki — and the pairing of Kikunojo III's onnagata-leaning bishonen presence with Yaozo II's more robust tachiyaku turn gives the diptych its central drama. Shunsho, founder of the Katsukawa school, composes the two figures across the two sheets against a clean ground, the costumes' patterns and the actors' individuated facial features carrying the visual weight. Yaozo II's Hachio-maru Aratora reads as the more outwardly martial role, while Aigo no Waka, draped in the ornate robes of an elegant page, holds the lyrical center. The Katsukawa school workshop's discipline in carving and printing is evident in the crispness of the linework and the cleanness of the color zones. Eleventh-month kaomise prints of paired actors were a staple of Edo ukiyo-e collecting in the 1770s, and Shunsho's contribution to that genre helped fix the kaomise yakusha-e as one of the era's most durable visual conventions.