Actor Ichikawa Danzō V as both Tsurifune no Sabu and Tamashima Isonojō
- Date:
- 1824
- Medium:
- Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
- Source:
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
This 1824 Osaka kamigata-e [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) (actor print) by Nansenrō Shibakuni, held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, depicts the touring Edo actor Ichikawa Danzō V in a dual role as the boatman Tsurifune no Sabu and the young samurai Tamashima Isonojō. The dual-role conceit, in which a single actor performs two characters in succession (often through hayagawari, the kabuki quick-change technique), was a Bunsei-era stage specialty that gave virtuoso performers a chance to display range within a single production and that Osaka publishers commemorated in prints that placed the two characters side by side within a single composition. Ichikawa Danzō V's 1824 appearance at the Osaka stage was a major theatrical event, since Edo-trained stars only periodically toured the kamigata circuit, and Shibakuni's documentation of the production places his print within the central documentary record of Bunsei-era cross-city kabuki performance. The composition is rendered as a color woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)) in ink and color on paper and exemplifies the mature Osaka kamigata-e idiom: tightly cropped half-length figures, intense facial focus, restrained palette, and the careful inscription of role names and actor name that anchored the print to a specific theatrical occasion. The print is part of a small but coherent body of Shibakuni prints at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (originally acquired by William Sturgis Bigelow during his residence in Japan between 1882 and 1889 and gifted to the MFA in 1911), and it constitutes one of the principal surviving documents of Danzō V's 1824 Osaka touring engagement alongside Shibakuni's parallel hagoita print of the same actor as Miuranosuke Yoshimura in Kamakura Sandaiki, preserved in the Lyon Collection.
c. 1823
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
c. 1821
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
c. 1824
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
歌舞伎
Woodblock print
1955
Woodblock print
1928
Color lithograph
1930
Color lithograph
Actor Ichikawa Danzō V as both Tsurifune no Sabu and Tamashima Isonojō was created by Nansenrō Shibakuni (南川楼芝国) in 1824.
Actor Ichikawa Danzō V as both Tsurifune no Sabu and Tamashima Isonojō depicts kabuki and theater.