Memorial Portrait of the Actor Onoe Kikugoro V

Dated 1903 by the museum, this memorial portrait of Onoe Kikugoro V cannot have been newly drawn by Utagawa Kunisada, who died in 1864; the print is best understood as a late commemoration in the Kunisada manner produced by his school's heirs at the time of Kikugoro V's death. Kikugoro V was one of the towering figures of late nineteenth-century kabuki, celebrated for his roles in both classic Edo plays and in the newly minted zangirimono and katsureki dramas of the Meiji theater. The conventions of the shini-e remained remarkably stable from the Edo into the Meiji period, and this sheet retains the visual grammar that Kunisada himself had codified: the actor depicted in priestly robes with shaved head, accompanied by his Buddhist death name (kaimyo), a poetic farewell verse, and a cartouche of biographical particulars. The print's visual vocabulary, the brocade-patterned border, the sumi-rich rendering of face and robe, the discreetly placed crest, locates it firmly within the legacy of yakusha-e developed in Edo ukiyo-e. As a transitional object, it documents the way Kunisada's templates continued to govern the iconography of theatrical memorial well after the close of the Edo period. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression as part of its survey of Utagawa-school production, where it serves as evidence of how the design conventions of an Edo master persisted into the early twentieth century and continued to mediate Tokyo's relationship with its actor celebrities.