Ichikawa Ebizo (famous Kabuki actor) playing the role of Tamiyai Taro

Ichikawa Ebizo (famous Kabuki actor) playing the role of Tamiyai Taro is a yakusha-e print by Utagawa Kunisada, the leading Edo ukiyo-e designer of actor prints during the first half of the nineteenth century. The sheet depicts a star of the Ichikawa lineage in the demanding role of the warrior Tamiyai Taro, captured at a moment of theatrical tension. Kunisada studied with Utagawa Toyokuni I and built his career on a deep working knowledge of the Edo kabuki theatres, supplying memorial portraits, role debuts, and benefit-performance designs that allowed audiences to keep favourite actors close at hand. In this design he uses a strong half- or three-quarter-length composition, with sharp expression, defined mie pose, and patterned costume to communicate the character. The Ichikawa house, with its successive Ebizo and Danjuro names, was the most celebrated of all kabuki lineages, and Kunisada returned to its actors repeatedly across thousands of prints. The impression is held in a public ukiyo-e collection and indexed on ukiyo-e.org, where it joins the wider record of Kunisada's enormous theatrical output. Yakusha-e of this kind underpinned the commercial vitality of woodblock publishing in Edo and remain primary documents for the history of kabuki performance. Source: ukiyo-e.org / Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/aggv/dscn1876).