The Actor Bando Hikosaburo II

A hosoban benizuri-e by Torii Kiyomitsu portraying Bando Hikosaburo II, one of the major aragoto actors of Edo kabuki in the second half of the eighteenth century and a performer who appears repeatedly across Kiyomitsu's surviving yakusha-e. The Bando family of actors was one of the major Edo theatrical lineages of the period, alongside the Ichikawa, Onoe, Nakamura, and Segawa lines. Successive bearers of the Bando Hikosaburo name (numbered I through V across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) supplied Edo kabuki with leading male-role specialists, particularly in the aragoto (rough-business) and tachiyaku (male-role) repertoires. Bando Hikosaburo II's career through the 1750s, 1760s, and into the 1770s coincides with the peak of Kiyomitsu's yakusha-e production, and the Torii workshop's surviving prints of him constitute the major pictorial record of his stage career across multiple theatres and a wide range of roles. The print shows Hikosaburo II as a single standing figure on the narrow vertical sheet that the Torii school used as its default actor-print format. The hosoban format - approximately 31 by 14 cm - had been the standard Edo actor-print sheet since the late seventeenth century, well suited to single full-length theatrical portraits. The benizuri-e palette of pink and green over a black key block places the print in the period before the full-colour nishiki-e revolution of the mid-1760s. Kiyomitsu, third head of the Torii line, was the leading designer of Edo theatrical publicity during these years. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago.