Actor Segawa Kikunojō as Mizue Gozen

Held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and dated to 1745, Actor Segawa Kikunojō as Mizue Gozen is a hand-colored woodblock print depicting the leading onnagata Segawa Kikunojō I (1693-1749) in the role of Mizue Gozen, a female character from the Kabuki repertoire. Mizue Gozen appears in several Kabuki and jōruri plays, typically as a noblewoman or principal heroine whose dramatic situation drives the production's emotional core, and Segawa Kikunojō was among the actors most celebrated for the role in mid-eighteenth-century Edo. The 1745 dating places the print squarely within Segawa Kikunojō I's mature career, the period when his onnagata practice had become a fixture of Edo theatergoing and when single-sheet portraits of his most celebrated roles found a steady commercial market. Printed in the hand-colored beni-e mode characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, the work documents both the visual conventions of mid-Edo female-role performance and Yoshinobu's specialization within the onnagata portrait subgenre. The MFA Boston example provides one of the strongest dated documents of Yoshinobu's career.