Actor Kataoka Gadō II as Yodoya Tatsugorō

A second 1841 portrait by Kitagawa Toyohide of the Osaka actor Kataoka Gadō II, here in the role of Yodoya Tatsugorō. Yodoya Tatsugorō was a historical figure of the Genroku era (late seventeenth century), a famously wealthy Osaka merchant whose extravagant displays of fortune so offended the Tokugawa shogunate that his entire estate was confiscated in 1705 - an event that became one of the defining episodes of mercantile Osaka legend. The kabuki theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries periodically dramatised the Yodoya story under various titles, casting the merchant as a tragic or comic figure of urban grandeur destroyed by official jealousy. Kataoka Gadō II's appearance in the role belongs to the dense Osaka theatrical calendar of the early 1840s, the last months of unrestricted print publication before the Tenpō Reforms of 1842 effectively halted Osaka's commercial print trade. The single-figure composition - the actor centred against an undecorated ground, with the falling diagonals of his haori and hakama supplying the principal pictorial structure - is characteristic of Toyohide's surviving prints and exemplifies the connoisseur-oriented Kamigata production of the late Tenpō era. The sheet is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as part of the Spaulding Collection.