The Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I as a young man

Torii Kiyoshige depicts the celebrated Edo actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I in a young-man role of around 1742, the period of Ichimatsu's emergence as one of the major stars of the Edo kabuki stage. Sanogawa Ichimatsu I's name supplied Japanese textile history with the term ichimatsu-moyo, the checkerboard pattern of squares in alternating colours that he is said to have brought into Edo fashion after wearing checkered hakama on stage in a celebrated role. The pattern survives to the present day as one of the most enduring contributions of eighteenth-century kabuki to Japanese material culture, used in everything from kimono to the official emblem of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The print is on a habahiro hashira-e (wide pillar print) sheet in beni-e technique - hand-coloured woodblock printing with the application of beni (safflower red) pigment - representing an intermediate stage between the urushi-e of the earlier decades and the registered benizuri-e of the late 1740s. The habahiro hashira-e was a wider variant of the standard narrow hashira-e format, allowing a more substantial figural composition while preserving the vertical orientation suited to display on the wooden posts of an Edo townhouse interior. Held at the Art Institute of Chicago.