The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro Vl as Soga no Goro Tokimune (Rokudai-me Ichikawa Danjuro no Soga no Goro Tokimune)

The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro VI as Soga no Goro Tokimune is a yakusha-e by Toshusai Sharaku in the Art Institute of Chicago under accession 89854. The print depicts the leading aragoto actor Ichikawa Danjuro VI as Soga no Goro Tokimune, the younger of the two Soga brothers whose decades-long quest to avenge their father's murder supplied kabuki with one of its richest cycles. Designed in the okubi-e format that defined Sharaku's brief intervention in Edo ukiyo-e for the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo, the half-length portrait pushes Danjuro's head and shoulders close to the picture plane against the mica-flecked dark ground that gives the debut series its distinctive shimmer. Soga no Goro is the more impetuous and physically violent of the two brothers, and Sharaku registers this through a vehemently knotted brow, a downturned mouth, and the broadly drawn jaw that became standard for aragoto roles in the Ichikawa line. The actor's red-painted face (kumadori), heavy patterning of the robe, and aggressive forward tilt of the body together translate the visual vocabulary of aragoto kabuki into a still image. Within the Sharaku corpus, the print is one of the most legible demonstrations of how the artist absorbed the entire Ichikawa stylistic tradition while transforming it through the close, observational drawing for which his yakusha-e are unique.