The Actors Ichikawa Komazo I (L) and Nakamura Matsue I (R)

The Actors Ichikawa Komazo I (L) and Nakamura Matsue I (R), dated 1765, presents a dual portrait of two Edo actors at the moment of the full-color nishiki-e revolution, when Suzuki Harunobu and his collaborators were introducing the multi-color registration techniques that would supersede the two- and three-color benizuri-e in which Torii Kiyomitsu I had built his career. The Ichikawa Komazo line, founded as a branch within the broader Ichikawa lineage, supplied Edo kabuki with leading-male specialists across the eighteenth century, while Nakamura Matsue I belonged to the female-role tradition supported by the Nakamuraza acting families. Torii Kiyomitsu I, third head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I, here continues to work in the polished benizuri-e mode that defined his mature output, with delicately registered pink and green pigments laid over a precisely cut sumi outline, even as the nishiki-e innovation was reshaping the Edo print market. The benizuri-e process represented the immediate stage before the full-color revolution, and Kiyomitsu's continued production in the format across the mid-1760s documents the persistence of the earlier idiom alongside the new techniques. Kiyomitsu draws the paired figures 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 distinguishing the male role from the female role through subtle adjustments of contour while keeping both figures within the unified visual register of the design. The hosoban format frames the paired figures, with patterned costume motifs supplying the principal visual interest. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19942) as a record of the dual yakusha-e portrait at the transitional moment of mid-1760s Edo print production.