The Actor Sawamura Sojuro III

Tōshūsai Sharaku's 1794 single-figure portrait of Sawamura Sōjūrō III is among the more restrained examples of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e from his brief working period under publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō. Sōjūrō, a celebrated wagoto specialist, is shown in half-length with the bearing of a romantic lead rather than the contorted intensity of a villain. The face is given a long, oval contour with a precisely set mouth, a delicate fold above the eyelid, and a slight tilt of the head that suggests reflective dignity. Sharaku, true to form, does not flatten Sōjūrō's features into the prettified conventions of contemporary actor prints; the long nose, the slight heaviness of the lower lip, and the asymmetry of the brows all remain visible. The composition is not strictly an okubi-e bust portrait, but its concentration on the head and shoulders extends the close-up logic of that format. The actor's hair is rendered as a sculptural mass of lacquered ink, and the patterned silk collar offers a flat decorative passage that sets off the modeled face. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves an impression of this design, where the muted ground typical of Sharaku's later series throws the figure forward without recourse to the dramatic mica backgrounds of his debut group. The portrait is a useful counterweight to the artist's better-known images of snarling villains and roughneck manservants: it shows that Sharaku's diagnostic eye could confer as much specificity on a refined leading man as on a coarse antagonist, and that his project as a yakusha-e designer was not satirical but observational.