Naritaya Sansho (The actor Ichikawa Danjuro VI as Arakawa Taro Takesada)

Tōshūsai Sharaku's 1794 portrait of Ichikawa Danjurō VI as Arakawa Tarō Takesada is one of the relatively few okubi-e in his Edo ukiyo-e oeuvre to commemorate a leading aragoto specialist of the prestigious Naritaya lineage. The phrase "Naritaya Sanshō" in the title functions as a poetic name attached to the Ichikawa family, and Sharaku uses it as a header for a yakusha-e that focuses unsparingly on the actor's face. Danjurō VI is shown in three-quarter view, the heavy lacquered topknot rising above a broad, fleshy face whose brows are drawn into the bold aragoto scowl and whose mouth is set in a hard horizontal line. Where the kumadori makeup tradition of aragoto would normally flatten the face into a heroic mask, Sharaku reasserts the individual physiognomy: the chin is rounded, the cheek is full, and the corner of the eye carries a slight tension that humanizes the performance. The mica or muted background characteristic of Tsutaya Jūzaburō's premium printings throws the bust forward and isolates each contour. The composition demonstrates the close-up logic of Sharaku's most influential format, where the entire commercial and dramatic apparatus of the kabuki theater is concentrated into a face. The impression in the Art Institute of Chicago is among several surviving examples of this design, and it remains an important record of Danjurō VI's brief career — he died young — and of Sharaku's ability to take the most clichéd of kabuki visual conventions, the aragoto hero, and recover the specific human being beneath it.