TOSHUSAI SHARAKU (ACT. 1794-95)

Following the publication of the first group of ōkubi-e portrait by Sharaku, the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō followed up with a mixed group of yellow ground hosoban and mica ground ōban prints depicting actor full-length, and then returned half-length portraits in the slightly smaller aiban paper format, the images set against a mustard-yellow ground. Eleven prints of this type are known, which survive in very few individual impressions. Each head is accompanied by the actor’s personal crest and a cartouche enclosing his guild name (yago) and poetry name (haimyō), much in the style that Toyokuni had adopted for his actor portraits in his concurrent series An Almanac of Actors on the Stage (Yakusha butai no sugata-e) for the publisher Izumiya Ichibei.
The actor Kinsaku II was sixty-six at the time of his portrait and had just arrived in Edo from Osaka when he was hired for the kaomise performance to play Iwate Gozen, disguised as the maid Okane in play Otokoyama o-Edo no Ishizue, which was staged at the Kiri Theater in 11/1794.