The Actor Nakayama Kumetaro II

Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dated to 1794, this Toshusai Sharaku okubi-e is a bust portrait of the onnagata Nakayama Kumetaro II. As one of the actor prints Sharaku designed for the Edo publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo during his short but extraordinary working life, the sheet stands as a primary document of how the okubi-e format was being pressed into new analytical use within the larger field of Edo ukiyo-e.

Sharaku approaches Kumetaro II with the unsoftened attention his name now stands for. The face is drawn with the high-painted brows, smooth pale complexion, and small reddened mouth that the female-role convention required, but the line of the jaw and the upper lip retain the natural weight that betrays the male actor sustaining the part. The head tilts very slightly to one side and the eyes are drawn in a steady, level gaze: a stillness that lets the portrait operate as a quiet inventory of the conventions of stage femininity rather than as an idealized beauty image.

The hair is bound in an elaborate style with carefully indicated combs and pins, signaling the female-role rank of the character being played, with the keyblock work registering each strand of hair with disciplined precision. Costume is described through firm collar and shoulder lines and a restrained pattern across the kimono. Color is held to a tight palette of warm flesh, muted reds, and patterned grounds, with the dark mica background common to Tsutaya's premium yakusha-e giving the figure its quiet, almost lacquered depth.

As a single example within Sharaku's surviving corpus, the sheet shows how completely he treated each performer as a distinct subject rather than as a type. The Metropolitan Museum of Art retains the impression in its Asian Art collection, where it can be studied alongside other examples of late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e.