Memorial Portraits of the Actors Otani Baju II (right) and Ichikawa Monnosuke III (left)

This 1824 [diptych](/glossary/diptych) memorial print by Utagawa Toyokuni commemorates two kabuki stars who died in the same year, Otani Baju II on the right and Ichikawa Monnosuke III on the left. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet as part of its broad survey of Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) shini-e. Memorial prints were a specialized genre within [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) that combined portraiture with elegy, and Toyokuni was among the most sought-after designers for these commissions because his images of living performers had defined how Edo audiences pictured them. Here he treats the two actors with a quieter palette and a more inward expressive register than he might use for stage performance prints, while still preserving each man's distinct physiognomy. Inscriptions surrounding the portraits typically include posthumous Buddhist names, dates of death, and dedicatory poems from friends and patrons. By placing the two figures together on a single sheet, the publisher created a coordinated act of remembrance that doubled as a record of an unusually heavy year of loss in Edo's kabuki community. For contemporary collectors, owning such a print was a way of acknowledging the actors' contributions to the theater; for modern viewers, the work reveals how interwoven ukiyo-e publishing was with the public emotional life of the city, and how readily Toyokuni's pictorial vocabulary moved between celebration and mourning.