The Actors Segawa Kikunojo III as Karigane Obun, Nakayama Tomisaburo I as An no Oyasu, Iwai Kiyotaro II as Kaminari no Osha, Nakayama Tatezo I as Gokuin no Osen, and Ichikawa Monnosuke II as Hotei no Oichi (right to left), in "Gonin Onna," Scene One of the Play Waka Murasaki Edokko Soga, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Second Month, 1792

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated 1787, this Katsukawa Shunsho composition assembles five actors as the five female outlaws of the celebrated Gonin Onna group from scene one of the play Waka Murasaki Edokko Soga, performed at the Ichimura Theater in the second month of 1792. The Gonin Onna trope, a quintet of named female bandits, was a recurring kabuki vehicle that allowed five onnagata specialists to appear together in coordinated tour-de-force performance. Shunsho lines up Segawa Kikunojo III as Karigane Obun, Nakayama Tomisaburo I as An no Oyasu, Iwai Kiyotaro II as Kaminari no Osha, Nakayama Tatezo I as Gokuin no Osen, and Ichikawa Monnosuke II as Hotei no Oichi, reading right to left in the conventional Japanese pictorial order. Each figure is rendered with the Katsukawa school's signature attention to individualized facial features and to the costume patterns that signal both character and casting. As founder of the Katsukawa school of Edo ukiyo-e, Shunsho specialized in yakusha-e that documented the major productions of the Edo theatrical year, and the multi-figure Gonin Onna composition demanded the highest level of his workshop's coordinating skill. The Ichimura Theater's second-month production was a major event of the spring season, and Shunsho's commemorative print would have sold widely to theatergoers seeking a comprehensive record of the production. The Art Institute's sheet preserves a primary document of late-1780s Edo kabuki.