Onoe Kikugorō V as Daiba no Jinzō and Ichikawa Sadanji I as Itamiya Jūbei

Onoe Kikugorō V as Daiba no Jinzō and Ichikawa Sadanji I as Itamiya Jūbei (1883) is an ōban triptych by Toyohara Kunichika in the Art Institute of Chicago, pairing two of the leading actors of the early-Meiji Tokyo stage in roles from Kawatake Mokuami's contemporary kabuki repertoire. Onoe Kikugorō V (1844-1903) was Kunichika's most enduring subject — the actor whose career is documented continuously across the artist's prints from the 1860s through the late 1890s — and Ichikawa Sadanji I (1842-1904) was the third of the great Meiji triumvirate alongside Kikugorō V and Ichikawa Danjurō IX. The roles of Daiba no Jinzō and Itamiya Jūbei come from a Mokuami sewamono (contemporary domestic drama) of the early 1880s, in which the chivalrous townsman and the merchant are entangled in an Edo demi-monde plot of the kind that defined Mokuami's mature work and the late-Edo / early-Meiji kabuki it shaped. The print belongs to the same productive year as Kabuki Stars Before a Gracious Waterfall and the Ichikawa Udanji Sugawara triptych, and is representative of Kunichika's working method in the early 1880s: rapid documentation of major productions through ambitious multi-sheet compositions distributed quickly into the Tokyo market.