Actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II as the Lady of the Hairpin (Ichikawa Monnosuke Kogai no Tsubone)

Actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II as the Lady of the Hairpin (Ichikawa Monnosuke Kogai no Tsubone), dated 1755, presents the rising young actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II in a female-role appearance as Kogai no Tsubone, the Lady of the Hairpin. The Ichikawa Monnosuke line, established within the broader Ichikawa actor lineage of Edo kabuki, produced its second-generation namesake in the 1750s, and the kogai or ornamental hairpin role belonged to the wider repertoire of court-attendant onnagata roles that allowed actors to display refined feminine bearing and dress. Torii Kiyomitsu I, third head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I, here works in the polished benizuri-e mode that defined the school's mid-eighteenth-century output, a two- or three-color printing technique in which delicately registered pink and green pigments were laid over a precisely cut sumi outline. The benizuri-e process represented an intermediate stage between the earlier hand-colored tan-e and beni-e sheets of the founding Torii generation and the full-color nishiki-e revolution of the 1760s, and Kiyomitsu was the leading designer of the format during its peak years. Kiyomitsu draws the standing figure with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features characteristic of his polished onnagata idiom, the kogai hairpin and elaborately arranged hair establishing the character's court-attendant station through specific attributes. The hosoban format concentrates attention on the long ornamental vertical of the figure, with patterned robe motifs supplying the principal visual interest against the lightly inked ground. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/13291) as a record of the mid-1750s Ichikawa Monnosuke II portrait in the polished benizuri-e idiom of Kiyomitsu's mature yakusha-e practice.