The actors Ichikawa Ebizo V as Goshogun Kanki and Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Watonai Sankan in the play "Kokusanya Kassen," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the fifth month, 1850

This Art Institute of Chicago triptych, designed by Utagawa Kunisada under the Toyokuni III name in 1850, commemorates a Nakamura Theatre production of Kokusenya Kassen, the Battles of Coxinga, with Ichikawa Ebizo V as Kanki and Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Watonai. The play, adapted from Chikamatsu's bunraku original, had been a staple of kabuki for more than a century, and a 1850 production starring father and son in its key roles was an event the Edo print market would document at scale. Kunisada was the natural designer for the project: his nigao likenesses of both actors were canonical, and his ability to compose across three sheets gave the resulting triptych the choreographic tension the play required. The composition pits the two figures against each other in a frieze-like confrontation, with patterned costumes asserting the Chinese and Japanese cultural axes of the drama. As mature yakusha-e from his Toyokuni III period, the print shows Kunisada's full late-style vocabulary: dense surface, exact role-name cartouches, and the kind of strong middle-distance staging that worked equally well for street-stall display and album mounting. The Art Institute's catalogue preserves the production details, the venue, month, and year of performance, that mark this triptych as a precisely datable record within Edo ukiyo-e theatre documentation.