Toshusai Sharaku (act. 1794-95)
- Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as the Wet Nurse Shigenoi

Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as the Wet Nurse Shigenoi

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$80,000 - $100,000

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Sale 2338
Japanese & Korean Art Including Arts of the Meiji Period
15 September 2010
New York, Rockefeller Plaza Buy Catalog

Toshusai Sharaku (act. 1794-95)
Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as the Wet Nurse Shigenoi
An okubi-e (large-head portrait) on a dark silver-mica ground of the actor in the play Koinyobo somewake tazuna (The beloved's particolored reins), performed at the Kawarazaki Theater in the fifth month of Kansei 6 (1794), signed Toshusai Sharaku ga, published by Tsutaya Juzaburo-- good impression, faded and toned, wear to mica, pinhole worming
Oban tate-e; 14 9/16 x 9 3/8in. (36.9 x 23.8cm.)

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Shigenoi is the tragic heroine of a play about love and loyalty. This print shows the climax of the drama, known as Shigenoi's kowakare (parting from her child). The scene takes place on the departure of a feudal lord's daughter to a distant province to be married. Shigenoi, a maid, meets her long-lost young son, a child horseman who had been summoned to entertain the young lady. The son recognizes his mother, Shigenoi, by hearing her name and shows her a cloth amulet case, which Sharaku pictures here in her hand. Shigenoi had given it to him at their initial separation.

The actor who performs this role requires great skill to impart the character's psychological complexity. Iwai Hanshiro IV, famous for his chubby face, was one of the most celebrated female-role actors of the Kansei era.

The Tokyo National Museum will mount a Sharaku exhibition in 2011. The enigmatic master was also a principal focus of the 2008 exhibition "Designed for Pleasure" in New York, which remarked:

Theories persist about the identity of the master Sharaku, who worked for ten months between 1794 and 1795 in collaboration with the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo. Was he a Noh actor, a retainer of a daimyo, a woman, Tsutaya himself? The portrait here is among the thirty masterworks of the artist distinguished by their psychological intensity and reductive approach. So appealing today, it was said at the time that Sharaku's prints were too real, which may account for his sudden disappearance after such intense output. He was one of the few risks that soured for Tsutaya, but his faith in the artist is vindicated by the reverence for Sharaku prints that has persisted since the nineteenth century.
(Wall Label, "Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680--1860," Asia Society Museum, published in Impressions, journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, the exhibition co-organizer, no. 30 [2009]: 192.)

For another impression in the British Museum, see Yamaguchi Keizaburo, Sharaku, vol. 7 of Ukiyo-e taikei (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1973), pl. 23; Narazaki Muneshige and Yamaguchi Keizaburo, Daiei hakubutsukan/The British Museum..., vol. 11 of Ukiyo-e shuka (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1979), pl. 11; Narazaki Muneshige, ed., Daiei hakubutsukan II (The British Museum II), vol. 2 of Hizo ukiyo-e taikan Ukiyo-e Masterpieces in European Collections (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987), pl. 212; Yamaguchi Keizaburo, Sharaku no zenbo (The Sharaku portraits) (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1994), pl. 21.

Other impressions are in the collections of the Museée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne; Tokyo National Museum; Honolulu Academy of Arts; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; Kunsthalle, Bremen; Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich; Josai University, Saitama Prefecture.

• Japanese Art

• Sharaku, Toshusai (b. 1794)

• Sharaku, Toshusai (b. 1794)
• 18th Century
• Prints & Multiples
• woodcut
• Japan
• figures

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