Kabuki magazine - September 1925

This print was produced for the September 1925 issue of Kabuki, a specialist theatre periodical that documented the plays, actors and stagecraft of the Tokyo and Osaka stages. Shunsen's relationship with theatre journalism predated his shin-hanga career — he had begun his working life as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in the 1900s, contributing portrait drawings and stage sketches before turning increasingly to woodblock printmaking in the early 1920s. Periodicals such as Kabuki commissioned frontispieces and inserted plates from artists working in the yakusha-e tradition, and the woodblock-printed plate bound into a magazine issue was a recognised intermediate format between commercial illustration and the deluxe shin-hanga edition. The September 1925 date places this work at the moment Shunsen was beginning his Shin Nigao series for Watanabe Shōzaburō, his first sustained engagement with the actor-portrait genre. Stylistically these magazine prints share the close facial framing, restrained backgrounds and concentrated psychological attention of the contemporary Watanabe portraits, while typically using a smaller sheet size, fewer colour blocks and a less elaborate washi than the full deluxe nishiki-e production.