The Actors Ichikawa Ebizō V as the Outlaw Nippon Daemon (right) and Kataoka Gadō as Tokushima Gohei

Konishi Hirosada produced this 1849 horizontal chuban diptych for the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, pairing Ichikawa Ebizo V as the celebrated outlaw figure Nippon Daemon with Kataoka Gado as his antagonist Tokushima Gohei. The print captures a confrontation scene from a kabuki play in the gizoku — righteous outlaw — tradition, in which morally complex criminal protagonists demonstrate code-of-honor virtues that complicate their relationship with conventional law. The horizontal chuban format, less common than the vertical orientation in Hirosada's output, gave him room to develop a fuller landscape and architectural context behind the two figures while still maintaining the intimate scale of the chuban okubi-e. The pairing of Edo-based Ebizo V with the Osaka-based Gado documents the kind of cross-regional kabuki collaboration that briefly enlivened Osaka theaters in the late 1840s. The print is part of the Met's Charles A. Greenfield bequest of Osaka prints.