The Actors Ichimura Uzaemon VIII, Ichimura Kamezo I as Wankyu, and Nakamura Kiyosaburo I as Matsuyama in the play "Mitsugimono Irifune Nagoya," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the seventh month, 1750

The Actors Ichimura Uzaemon VIII, Ichimura Kamezo I as Wankyu, and Nakamura Kiyosaburo I as Matsuyama in the play Mitsugimono Irifune Nagoya, performed at the Ichimura Theater in the seventh month, 1750, is a Torii-workshop [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) attributed by the Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/32589) to Torii Kiyonobu. The 1750 date places the print at the very end of the Kiyonobu II generation's documented activity, immediately before the workshop's design contracts would transition into the next-generation Kiyomitsu signature in the 1750s and 1760s. Ichimura Uzaemon VIII was the actor-manager of the Ichimura-za, for which the Torii workshop held its exclusive design contract; the doubled office of actor and manager was characteristic of eighteenth-century Edo theatre administration. The Wankyu material derives from one of the most famous of the seventeenth-century kuruwa (pleasure-quarter) narratives: Wankyu was the historical Osaka merchant Wan'ya Kyuemon, whose ruinous infatuation with the Osaka Shinmachi courtesan Matsuyama (or Matsuyama tayu) in the 1670s had passed into joruri and kabuki dramatic adaptation as a foundational tale of mercantile financial collapse in the licensed quarter. By the eighteenth century the Wankyu-Matsuyama pair had become a recurring framework for kabuki productions exploring the entanglement of merchant capital and Yoshiwara (or Shinmachi) courtesan culture. Nakamura Kiyosaburo I as Matsuyama performs the courtesan onnagata-style. The seventh-month slot in the kabuki calendar was the midsummer programme. The play title's Nagoya (the rival samurai dandy of the Nagoya-Fuwa pair) and Mitsugimono Irifune (tribute-cargo entering-port) signal a hybrid Wankyu-Nagoya framework folding several distinct kuruwa narratives into a single production. The Torii broad contour line remained the workshop's visual signature into the late Kiyonobu II generation. The sheet is held by the Art Institute of Chicago.