The actor Nakamura Utaemon IV as Taira Shinno Masakado

The Actor Nakamura Utaemon IV as Taira no Shinnō Masakado is an 1842 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada from his late-career yakusha-e production. The historical Taira no Masakado was a tenth-century warrior who staged a rebellion against the imperial court in the eastern provinces, was killed in 941, and was thereafter remembered both as a traitor and as a powerful local deity. By the late Edo period Masakado had become a stock kabuki and gōkan-fiction figure, and the role was a favourite vehicle for leading aragoto actors. Nakamura Utaemon IV, head of one of the great Kamigata acting lineages and a star of the early 1840s Edo and Osaka stages, played Masakado in performances that Kunisada — as the dominant designer of late Edo ukiyo-e — would have observed and translated immediately into print. The composition isolates the figure against a flat or sparsely treated ground, with the warrior's heavy robes, sashes and accessories carrying the principal pictorial event. The face is rendered with the strong individuality that distinguishes nigao-e actor portraits, and the kumadori makeup of the aragoto manner is rendered through the woodblock printer's red overprinting. By 1842 Kunisada's mature style — firm and slightly heavy contour, saturated mineral palette, dense pattern work — was fully formed, and the Tenpō Reforms then in force pushed publishers to disguise actor identification while keeping the visual signs of the role intact. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression and dates it precisely to 1842.