The Actor Ichimura Shichijuro (Uzaemon X) as Senzaimaru

The Actor Ichimura Shichijuro (Uzaemon X) as Senzaimaru, dated 1754, presents the head of the Ichimuraza acting family in the role of Senzaimaru, a wakashugata young-man role from the era's commercial theater repertoire. Ichimura Uzaemon X, who managed the Ichimuraza as zamoto while also appearing on its stage under the name Ichimura Shichijuro, occupied the dual roles of producer and performer that the kabuki yashichi system of the three licensed Edo theaters made possible, and his appearances as a stage actor accordingly carried both the prestige of family leadership and the practical authority of theatrical management. 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 that distinguish his hand from the muscular hyotan-ashi mode of his Torii predecessors, the line oriented toward the elegant ornamental rhythm of the wakashugata register rather than the violent expressive weight that characterized aragoto portraiture. The hosoban format concentrates attention on the long ornamental vertical of the figure, with patterned costume 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/47776) as a record of the mid-1750s Ichimuraza zamoto portrait in the polished benizuri-e idiom of Kiyomitsu's mature yakusha-e practice.