Artist: Ueno Tadamasa 上野忠雅 (1904–1970), later Torii Tadamasa Series: Kabuki Sugata-goyomi 歌舞伎姿暦 (Calendar of Kabuki Figures / Calendar of Kabuki Roles and Actors) Sheet: 三月 — March Subject: Agemaki 揚巻 from Sukeroku Yukari no Edo Zakura 助六由縁江戸桜 (Sukeroku: Flower of Edo) Date: c. 1950 Format: yoko-ōban (horizontal ōban), full margins approx. 40*27 cm Technique: mokuhanga — multi-block colour woodblock on hōsho 1. Impression and colour A beautifully struck impression. The silver-grey ground is graded with the softest bokashi, against which the pale pink cherry petals drift in suspended weightlessness — a printing effect that depends entirely on the precision of registration and the restraint of the printer, both of which Shinmi Saburō delivers in full. 2. Paper and condition Heavy hōsho paper with full margins. Excellent overall condition. Some minor foxing, mainly visible on the verso, with the front largely unaffected. 3. The subject — Agemaki, oiran of the Miuraya Agemaki is the most celebrated courtesan in all of Kabuki — the oiran (highest-ranking yūjo) of the Miuraya house in the Yoshiwara, and the lover of the swaggering Edo dandy Sukeroku. She is the female lead of Sukeroku Yukari no Edo Zakura (Sukeroku: Flower of Edo), one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban — the eighteen plays the Ichikawa family proclaimed as the supreme repertoire of the Edo stage. The play premiered in 1713 and has been performed continuously ever since. Agemaki's entrance is one of the great set-pieces of Kabuki. She progresses down the hanamichi in the full dōchū parade of an Edo oiran: the towering black lacquered geta, the elaborate date-hyōgo coiffure bristling with tortoiseshell kanzashi and kushi combs radiating outward like a halo, the obi tied at the front, the layered uchikake trailing behind — every detail a coded display of rank, wealth and the iconography of the Yoshiwara at its peak. Tadamasa shows her in precisely this state: the head crowned with the dense radial spray of hairpins, the painted geisha-white face turning sideways with the unhurried composure of a woman who knows she is being watched. The ground is empty silver-grey except for the falling petals — Edo-zakura, the cherry of Edo, naming her city, her play, and her season. 4. The artist and the series Ueno Tadamasa (1904–1970), born Ueno Katsumi, was the most important Kabuki print artist of the mid-twentieth century. He trained under Torii Kiyotada VII (Kiyotada IV in some numberings, 1875–1941), the head of the Torii school — the painter-printmaker lineage that had supplied Edo's Kabuki theatres with billboards and actor prints since the seventeenth century. The syllable tada in his artist name was a direct gift from his master's name, Kyotada. In 1949 the Torii family granted him the right to take their family name itself, and he became Tadamasa Torii — an extraordinary honour that confirmed him as their successor. The Kabuki Sugata-goyomi (Calendar of Kabuki Figures) is a series of twelve sheets, one for each month of the year, each devoted to a different celebrated Kabuki role. The bold designs feature dramatically cropped compositions that focus on facial expression and hairstyle, rendered with strong calligraphic line and vivid colour, bringing the spectacular world of Kabuki to life. It is one of Tadamasa's finest series and is rarely seen complete on the market. 5. Two roads after Edo: where this print stands In the twentieth century, woodblock prints of Kabuki took two clearly divergent paths. One road was refined, atmospheric, and deeply influenced by Western pictorial values — the tradition of Natori Shunsen and Ōta Masamitsu (Gakō), working under Watanabe Shōzaburō and other shin-hanga publishers, who treated the Kabuki actor as a psychological subject and surrounded him in soft tonal modelling and naturalistic colour. The other road remained loyal to the bold conventions of Edo yakusha-e — flat fields, decorative pattern, exaggerated kumadori, and the theatricality of the Torii school billboard tradition. This road was led by Torii Kiyotada IV/VII and carried into the postwar decades by his pupil Ueno Tadamasa, the present artist. Prints of this second tradition occupy a fascinating position. They are not quite ukiyo-e in the Edo sense — too modern, too synthesised, too aware of design as design. And they are not shin-hanga either — too flat, too graphic, too unwilling to soften the savage stylisation of the Kabuki stage into atmospheric mood. They stand in their own territory: expressive, declarative, almost poster-like in their graphic boldness, yet rooted in a craft tradition with three hundred years of continuous practice behind it. The Kagamijishi sheet is a textbook case — the ground is a single graded gold field, the figure is reduced to silhouette, line and pigment, and yet every line carries the weight of the Torii school's accumulated stagecraft. It is precisely this independence from both camps — ukiyo-e and shin-hanga — that makes Tadamasa's prints so distinctive, and increasingly so as collectors come to recognise the originality of what he was doing.