The Actor Onoe Matsusuke I as Ashikaga Takauji in the Play Kumoi no Hana Yoshino no Wakamusha, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1786

This late eighteenth-century [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago and indexed through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org under Natori Shunsen's name as part of the institution's broader ukiyo-e cataloging, depicts the actor Onoe Matsusuke I in the role of Ashikaga Takauji in the play Kumoi no Hana Yoshino no Wakamusha, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month of 1786. Takauji, the fourteenth-century founder of the Muromachi shogunate, is a frequent kabuki figure in plays drawn from the wars between the Northern and Southern Courts, and the role allowed Onoe Matsusuke I, one of the major Edo onnagata-turned-tachiyaku performers of his generation, to display the stately authority associated with classical warrior portraiture. The figure is shown in the slim, full-length single-actor format characteristic of Tenmei-era yakusha-e, with firm contour lines, attentively patterned court dress, and a stylized facial expression that emphasizes restraint and dignity. Although Natori Shunsen's own work belongs to the twentieth-century [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) movement, in which he collaborated with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo on the long-running Shunsen nigao shu portrait series, the museum's cataloging here groups an earlier Edo print under his name as part of its wider ukiyo-e holdings. The sheet preserves the visual language and serious-minded approach to actor portraiture that shin-hanga designers consciously sought to renew, providing a useful historical anchor for understanding the deep traditions on which Shunsen built his twentieth-century practice.