The Ninth Ichimura Uzaemon in the Title Role of the Drama Nagoya Sanza

The Ninth Ichimura Uzaemon in the Title Role of the Drama Nagoya Sanza, dated 1757, is one of Kitao Shigemasa's early yakusha-e and is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The print depicts the actor Ichimura Uzaemon IX in the role of Nagoya Sanza, a swaggering, dandified hero figure from the kabuki repertoire whose stories of romantic entanglement and rivalry with Fuwa no Banzaemon were enormously popular in eighteenth-century Edo. Shigemasa was in his late teens when this print appeared, and the work belongs to a transitional period of Edo ukiyo-e in which benizuri-e and limited color techniques still dominated yakusha-e before the explosion of nishiki-e multicolor printing in the mid-1760s. His handling of the actor's costume, the boldly patterned outer robe and the dramatic sword fittings of the Nagoya Sanza role, demonstrates the close attention that ukiyo-e designers paid to the costume conventions of kabuki, which functioned as visual shorthand for character type. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the work within its strong collection of eighteenth-century actor prints. As future founder of the Kitao school, Shigemasa was at this stage absorbing influences from the dominant Torii school and from his older contemporaries while beginning to develop the clean line and balanced posture that would become Kitao trademarks. The print is therefore important both as a record of a particular kabuki performance in the late 1750s and as a document of an early phase in Shigemasa's career, showing how he engaged from his earliest professional years with the visual culture of the kabuki stage.