The Actor Segawa Kikunojo II

A hosoban print by Torii Kiyomitsu portraying Segawa Kikunojo II, the leading onnagata (female-role specialist) of Edo kabuki in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Segawa Kikunojo II had become by the late 1750s the most celebrated onnagata of Edo, taking over from his father Segawa Kikunojo I as the leading female-role specialist of the Ichimura-za and the Nakamura-za. He was the most repeatedly portrayed actor in Kiyomitsu's surviving yakusha-e, and the artist's prints of him constitute the major pictorial record of his career across multiple Edo theatres. The Segawa family of actors - founded as a major onnagata lineage in the early eighteenth century - continued through Kikunojo III, IV, and beyond into the nineteenth century, with each successive bearer of the name inheriting both the prestige and the obligations of the line. The Art Institute of Chicago records the present print's date as circa 1771, a period by which Kiyomitsu's Torii workshop had fully adopted full-colour nishiki-e printing. The transition from the two- and three-colour benizuri-e of the 1750s and early 1760s to the eight- or ten-colour nishiki-e of the 1770s transformed the visual range of Edo prints and altered the visual conventions of yakusha-e accordingly. Two impressions of the design are held at the Art Institute of Chicago (this accession 1931.258 and a related impression at accession 1925.2010).