Two-lines make-up for Matsuō

This 1952 color woodblock ōban, recorded in the Japanese Art Open Database, depicts the distinctive two-line kumadori makeup of the role of Matsuō from the kabuki play Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami ("Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy"). The Matsuō role, one of the three brothers Matsuō, Umeō, and Sakuramaru, is among the most demanding aragoto parts in the kabuki repertoire and is associated with a precise two-stripe red kumadori pattern that runs from the corner of the eye across the cheek. Ueno Tadamasa's print, part of his celebrated 1951–1953 Shōkokusha series on the eighteen kabuki plays, isolates the actor's head and shoulders so that the makeup itself becomes the primary subject. The design is an exemplary record of the Torii school's continuing engagement with the technical details of kabuki performance during the early postwar revival of the form, and it sits inside Tadamasa's broader project of cataloguing the canonical kumadori as a graphic art.