Memorial Portrait of the Actor Onoe Kikugoro III

Memorial Portrait of the Actor Onoe Kikugorō III is an 1849 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada — the shini-e of one of the greatest kabuki actors of the early nineteenth century. Onoe Kikugorō III (1784–1849) had been one of the dominant figures of the Edo stage for decades, equally celebrated in male leads and onnagata roles, and Kunisada had been designing his portrait throughout the actor's career, often pairing him with Iwai Kumesaburō II in some of the most famous yakusha-e of the 1820s and 1830s. When Kikugorō III died, Edo publishers responded immediately with memorial prints, and a Kunisada shini-e was the most visible and authoritative of these. The shini-e genre had its own visual conventions: the actor is shown in a final pose, often in a robe with a memorial pattern or holding the rosary and prayer cloth of the dead, sometimes against a ground that carries his posthumous Buddhist name, the date of death and a memorial poem. Kunisada handles the portrait with the firm, individualised likeness of his mature nigao-e manner, the line tightened against the picture's commemorative register, and the patterned silk recorded in dense overprinting. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression and dates it precisely to 1849, locating it within the immediate aftermath of Kikugorō III's death and within Kunisada's larger record of an actor he had been representing for nearly forty years. As shini-e, the print is also a primary document of how late Edo ukiyo-e and the kabuki theatres mourned their stars in public, in print.