The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V and his family, from an untitled series of four prints showing Actors in private life

This Torii Kiyonaga print in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated 1783, shows the great Edo kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjuro V with his family and forms part of an untitled series of four prints depicting actors in private life. The series departs from the standard yakusha-e convention of presenting performers in role on stage; instead, it shows leading actors in domestic settings, an unusual subject that capitalized on Edo audiences' curiosity about their stars off the kabuki boards. Danjuro V, who dominated the Edo stage in the late eighteenth century, was particularly well placed for this kind of celebrity-as-householder treatment. Kiyonaga, as fourth head of the Torii school, was bound by the workshop's longstanding ties to the kabuki theater, but he uses this off-stage subject to apply the calm, refined idiom of his Edo bijin-ga to actors and their wives, children, and attendants. Figures are placed in his tall, broad-shouldered proportions within a domestic interior, the costume patterning emphasizing comfort and family identity rather than dramatic role. The series thus offers an important moment in the history of yakusha-e in which the actor is presented as a private individual—a step that anticipates the personality-focused actor portraits of the Kansei and Bunka periods. As an Art Institute of Chicago holding, this impression is a key document of the Torii school's late-eighteenth-century experimentation with the boundaries between bijin-ga and yakusha-e under Kiyonaga's direction.