A Poster for the Ichimura Theatre (Ichimuraza tsuji banzuke)

A large-format Edo theatrical poster (tsuji banzuke) for the Ichimura-za, one of the three licensed kabuki theatres of Edo, designed by Torii Kiyomasu II in the o-oban format used by the Torii school for the most prominent of its commercial publicity sheets. The tsuji banzuke - literally 'street-corner programme' - was a single-sheet poster intended for display at street corners and at the doors of the theatre itself, announcing an upcoming run with the names of the principal actors, the title of the play, and often a representative image from the production. As such it operated at the intersection of advertising and reportage, supplying the Edo populace with the information needed to plan a theatrical visit and the visual evidence to recognise the leading performers when they appeared on stage. The Torii school held the exclusive contract to design publicity for the three licensed Edo theatres - the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za - across the long eighteenth century, and the tsuji banzuke for the Ichimura-za was one of the workshop's principal product lines. The Ichimura family of actor-managers had run the Ichimura-za since the late seventeenth century, with successive bearers of the Ichimura Uzaemon name numbered through the generations and providing both the theatre's management and a substantial portion of its on-stage talent. The o-oban sheet - approximately twice the size of the standard hosoban actor print - gave Kiyomasu II room to develop a more elaborate composition than the hosoban allowed, and the sumizuri-e (black-ink-only) medium of the print, dated by the Art Institute of Chicago to circa 1715, reflects the early state of the Torii workshop's publicity production before tan-e and urushi-e techniques became standard. Held at the Art Institute of Chicago.