The actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as the wet nurse Shigenoi

Tōshūsai Sharaku's 1794 portrait of Iwai Hanshirō IV as the wet nurse Shigenoi is one of the most psychologically weighted Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e produced during the artist's brief working career. Shigenoi is a stock kabuki figure whose great scene involves recognizing her own son in a horseman she must turn away, and Sharaku captures Hanshirō at a moment of suppressed emotion: the eyes are gently lowered, the mouth held in a careful, slightly trembling line, and the brow softened just enough to suggest tears about to fall. As is characteristic of Sharaku's onnagata portraits, the male features beneath the female role remain legible — the strong line of the jaw, the slight heaviness of the chin — but they are integrated into the performance rather than working against it. The composition pushes the figure close to the picture plane in the close-up manner related to the okubi-e bust format, leaving the patterned collar, the carefully arranged hair ornaments, and the lacquered tortoise-shell comb to frame the modeled face. Published by Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the design carries the taut keyblock lines and careful registration that defined the publisher's premium output. The impression in the Art Institute of Chicago documents the artistry of one of the great onnagata of late-eighteenth-century Edo kabuki and Sharaku's willingness to grant a maternal supporting character the same diagnostic attention he otherwise reserved for star tachiyaku. The print also illustrates why Sharaku, despite the famously brief duration of his career, came to be recognized as a designer of unusual emotional intelligence.