Memorial Portrait of the Actor Kataoka Nizaemon VIII

This 1862 color woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper in ōban format, held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number 1937.242), is a memorial portrait (shini-e) of the kabuki actor Kataoka Nizaemon VIII (1810-1863), one of the leading onnagata and tachiyaku of mid-nineteenth-century Osaka kabuki. Shini-e — commemorative prints issued in the wake of a celebrated actor's death — were a recurrent product of late-Edo Osaka and Edo print publishing, and they typically combined an idealized portrait of the deceased with text recording the actor's name, age at death, and lineage. Yoshimori's portrait of Nizaemon VIII places the actor in stage costume against a quiet background and inscribes the commemorative apparatus in the upper register of the print. The image shows Yoshimori's command of the actor-print (yakusha-e) tradition that had been one of the principal genres of the Utagawa school under his teacher Kuniyoshi and Kuniyoshi's contemporary Toyokuni III, and it documents Yoshimori's continuing engagement with the established commercial genres of Edo print publishing alongside his more famous Yokohama-e and Meiji output. The print is signed Yoshimori ga. It entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection through the Judson D. Metzger Collection.