Onoe Matsusuke I as Matsushita Mikinojō in the Play "Katakiuchi noriyaibanashi"

This 1794 okubi-e by Toshusai Sharaku, held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts the actor Onoe Matsusuke I in the role of Matsushita Mikinojo in the kabuki play Katakiuchi Noriyaibanashi (A Medley of Tales of Revenge). The print belongs to the body of yakusha-e Sharaku designed for the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo and is one of several surviving images that document the same theatrical run within Sharaku's short Edo ukiyo-e career.

Matsushita Mikinojo is a samurai role within the play's revenge plot, and Sharaku's portrait conveys the character's contained moral attention. Matsusuke I is drawn with a long, lean face, narrow eyes set under sober brows, and a mouth held in a tight, level line. The line of the jaw is allowed its natural weight, and the small wrinkles along the nose and at the corner of the mouth are kept on the surface of the print rather than smoothed away. The head is held very slightly forward, the gaze directed off-axis at an unseen interlocutor; the entire portrait reads as a study of a man whose role demands silence and inwardness more than display.

The hair is dressed in the male warrior style, with sakayaki shaved at the front and the topknot tied behind, each strand drawn with the disciplined keyblock work for which Sharaku's heads are particularly admired. Costume is described through firm collar and shoulder strokes, with the family crest indicated and the kimono pattern kept restrained so that the face dominates. Color is held to warm flesh, deep black, and muted grounds, and the dark mica background characteristic of Tsutaya's premium yakusha-e gives the head its velvet depth.

As an instance of late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, the print demonstrates Sharaku's reach across the full repertory of samurai role-types. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the impression.