The Actor Sawamura Sojuro II

Torii Kiyoshige portrays Sawamura Sojuro II on a narrow hosoban sheet in benizuri-e, dating to around 1750. Sawamura Sojuro II - successor in the Sawamura acting line founded by Sojuro I - performed across the Edo theatres in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, and the Torii school's continuing contract to design publicity for the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za produced a sustained pictorial record of his stage career. The benizuri-e technique, of registered pink and green colour blocks printed over a black key block, had emerged in the late 1740s and largely replaced the earlier hand-coloured urushi-e and beni-e methods over the decade that followed. The transition from hand-applied colour to registered colour blocks was the defining technical development of mid-eighteenth-century Edo printmaking, prefiguring the full-colour nishiki-e revolution that Suzuki Harunobu and his collaborators would introduce in the mid-1760s. Kiyoshige's work spans both sides of this transition, with his earlier urushi-e of the 1730s giving way to benizuri-e in his work of the 1750s.