The Actor Matsumoto Koshiro IV as the Wealthy Bumpkin from Yamato, Actually Magoemon of Ninokuchi Village (Yondai-me Matsumoto Koshiro no Yamato no Yabo Daijin, jitsuwa Ninokuchi-mura Magoemon)

This portrait by Toshusai Sharaku captures Matsumoto Koshiro IV in a complex kabuki role: he appears as a wealthy but unsophisticated provincial figure from Yamato who is in fact Magoemon of Ninokuchi Village, a character whose social masking forms the dramatic engine of the play. The convention of disguised identity gave Sharaku one of his recurring subjects, and his analytical eye is well suited to the friction between assumed and underlying selves. In this yakusha-e, Koshiro IV's features are rendered with the precise particularity that distinguishes Sharaku from more idealizing print designers: the brow is strongly marked, the mouth carefully set, and the gaze directed with the focused intensity that the role demands. The composition aligns with Sharaku's preferred okubi-e mode, concentrating expressive resources in the head and upper body and using firmly drawn contours and a controlled palette to produce a study of character. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its substantial Sharaku holdings, where it permits comparative study with other portraits of Koshiro IV in different roles. Published by Tsutaya Juzaburo, whose firm Tsutaya financed Sharaku's prolific but brief career, the print uses careful block registration and high-quality pigments to produce a luxury object in the genre of Edo ukiyo-e actor portraiture. Within the wider history of the tradition, this work remains a primary document of how Sharaku transformed routine theatrical memento into a vehicle for sustained psychological observation.