The Actor Tsutsui Kichijuro

Dated to approximately 1704, this o-oban tan-e portrait depicts the kabuki actor Tsutsui Kichijuro in performance. The print is a characteristic example of Torii Kiyomasu I's mature actor portraiture: a single full-length figure rendered in heavy outline and filled with hand-applied tan pigment (the brilliant orange-red mineral coloring derived from lead oxide that gives tan-e its name). The actor's pose, costume patterning, and the swelling treatment of the limbs all draw on the bold theatrical vocabulary that the Torii school developed for advertising kabuki performances. This kind of large-format print would have functioned both as a memento for fans and as a marker of an actor's professional stature within the Edo theatrical world. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the print is one of the museum's important examples of early eighteenth-century tan-e printmaking from the founding generation of the Torii workshop.