The Actor Segawa Kikunojo II

The Actor Segawa Kikunojo II, dated 1756, presents one of the most celebrated onnagata of the eighteenth century at the moment of his rising prominence within the Edo female-role tradition. Segawa Kikunojo II, who succeeded the founding Segawa onnagata Segawa Kikunojo I and would dominate the Edo stage through the 1760s and 1770s, here appears in a single-figure portrait of the kind that the Torii workshop produced as ongoing publicity for the leading actors of the licensed theaters. 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 onnagata register. The Segawa line, whose stage name was sometimes abbreviated as Roko in the haiku-style poetry of the actor circles, became closely associated with Kiyomitsu's benizuri-e portraits across the mid-eighteenth century. 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/23273) as a record of the mid-1750s Segawa Kikunojo II portrait at the height of Kiyomitsu's benizuri-e yakusha-e practice.