The Actor Sanogawa Mangiku I as Sanada, the daughter of the spinner Itoya, with an attendant in the play "Hiragana Yomeiri Izu Nikki," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month, 1718

The Actor Sanogawa Mangiku I as Sanada, the daughter of the spinner Itoya, with an attendant in the play Hiragana Yomeiri Izu Nikki, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month, 1718, documents a kaomise opening at the Nakamuraza in which one of the leading onnagata of the Kyoho era took a domestic role within a Heian-period romance narrative. Torii Kiyonobu I, founder of the Torii school of yakusha-e and the artist whose hand defined Edo theatrical advertising at the turn of the eighteenth century, here pairs the leading female-role performer with an attendant figure in the dual composition that the Torii workshop developed alongside its single-figure portraits. The kaomise or face-showing season that opened each November announced the cast for the coming theatrical year, and prints commemorating its productions carried particular weight as advertising for the company that the audience would follow through the spring and summer. Kiyonobu draws the standing figures in the disciplined bold contour that he and his Torii circle codified for sumizuri-e yakusha-e, the line restrained from the muscular hyotan-ashi mimizu-gaki manner reserved for aragoto and yet still carrying the principal expressive weight of the design against the lightly inked ground. The hosoban or wide-bordered tate-e format concentrates attention on the two long ornamental verticals, with patterned costume motifs supplying the principal visual interest in the absence of an elaborated setting. The character of the spinner's daughter belongs to the domestic register of late-1710s sewamono drama, and the costume signals her station through pattern and accessory rather than through the elaborate court robes of historical roles. As founder of the Torii yakusha-e tradition, Kiyonobu produced such commemorative portraits in direct service to the licensed Edo theaters, with the print functioning as both performance souvenir and ongoing publicity for the actor's repertoire. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19244) as a record of how the founding Torii hand documented specific role-and-run combinations at the height of Kyoho-era Edo kabuki.