Actors

This mid-nineteenth-century woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (accession number sc144621), is a [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) (actor print) by Utagawa Yoshikatsu dated by the museum to 1847-1852, the late Tenpō and Kōka eras when Yoshikatsu was producing actor portraits and warrior prints in modest quantity from his Edo studio. The print is a representative example of the steady commercial yakusha-e production that occupied the broad middle stratum of the Utagawa school in the late Bakumatsu period, the years immediately before the dramatic political upheavals of the 1850s and 1860s began to reshape both Edo theatre and the print industry that served it. Yoshikatsu had trained in the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), the great Edo designer of warrior prints, and his work inherits both Kuniyoshi's dynamic figural drawing and the conventional Utagawa-school approach to actor portraiture: the careful attention to signature facial features by which Edo audiences identified their favorite performers, the use of crests (mon) on costume to confirm role identity, and the placement of cartouches with actor names and role titles. The print's accession number indicates that it entered the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by way of the Spaulding Collection or one of the museum's other foundational Japanese print holdings, which together constitute one of the most important repositories of Japanese woodblock prints in North America. The work is preserved in the museum's collection of Japanese yakusha-e and is the principal MFA Boston impression of Yoshikatsu's signed late-Tenpō work.