Memorial Portrait of the Actor Suketakaya Kodenji

An ōban color woodblock print of 1899 in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection, this Memorial Portrait of the Actor Suketakaya Kodenji is one of Kunisada III's late shini-e (death-prints) commemorating a leading kabuki performer of the Meiji stage. Suketakaya Kodenji was a Tokyo onnagata of the late Meiji theater whose female-role performances drew the same fan loyalty that earlier Edo audiences had given to the Iwai and Segawa lines; his death in 1899 drew from his designer a formal shini-e in the genre conventions inherited from the late-Edo Utagawa studio. The composition pictures the actor in formal robes against an inscribed cartouche recording his lay name, his posthumous Buddhist name (kaimyō), and a brief eulogy; the funereal cartouche conventions descend directly from Kunisada I's 1865 Memorial Portrait of Toyokuni I and Kunisada II's 1864 portrait of Kunisada I, marking this print as a third-generation continuation of the same tradition. Issued under his Kunisada III signature, the print belongs to the body of actor work the artist continued to produce for the Tokyo kabuki houses through the late Meiji years, when shini-e were among the few [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) formats still commercially viable as photography began to displace the woodblock as the popular image medium.