The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo II

A hosoban print by Torii Kiyomitsu portraying Ichikawa Yaozo II, a younger member of the Ichikawa family of Edo kabuki actors. The Ichikawa Yaozo name was one of the secondary actor titles within the broader Ichikawa lineage - alongside Ichikawa Danjuro, Ichikawa Ebizo, Ichikawa Komazo, Ichikawa Raizo, and Ichikawa Monnosuke - and the bearers of the name (Yaozo I, II, III, etc.) performed alongside their senior relatives in the Ichikawa family's theatrical productions. The Ichikawa Yaozo II of this print was active in the 1760s and 1770s, and his career is documented across multiple Torii-school yakusha-e of the period. The Ichikawa family's continuous practice of bringing junior performers into the major Edo theatres alongside the senior Danjuro and Ebizo names ensured a continuous succession of trained actors prepared to inherit the senior titles in due course. The print is dated by the Art Institute of Chicago to around 1771, in the period when Kiyomitsu's Torii workshop had completed the transition to full-colour nishiki-e printing introduced in 1765. The hosoban format - a single full-length actor on a narrow vertical sheet, approximately 31 by 14 cm - remained the Torii school's default yakusha-e composition across the benizuri-e and nishiki-e periods alike, the format's basic compositional logic surviving the technical revolution that transformed the visual range of the prints themselves.