Kunisada — Hengemono dance 助六姿の裏梅 1857. Ιαπωνική ξυλογραφία σε ξύλο - Ιαπωνία - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞・三代豊国, 1786–1865)

Title: Role cartouches only, upper left:
– 助六 Sukeroku
– 揚巻 Agemaki
From the hengemono dance 助六姿の裏梅 — Sukeroku sugata no uraume, staged at the Nakamura-za, Edo, third month of 1857.

Subject: Nakamura Fukusuke I in both roles — the otokodate Sukeroku and the courtesan Agemaki — from a quick-change (hayagawari) dance in which the same actor took Sukeroku, Agemaki and the villain Ikyū in succession.

Format: Ōban tate-e, ca. 36 × 24 cm
Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print) on hōsho paper
Date: 1857 (Ansei 4). Aratame censor seal with date seal present.
Signature: 豊国画 Toyokuni ga, in the red toshidama cartouche
Publisher: 大黒屋 Daikokuya (Kinnosuke), Asakusa Namiki-chō
Reference: A sheet from this 1857 Nakamura-za dance is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, acc. no. E.6285:1-1886, catalogued under the set title Gohenge shosagoto no uchi (五変化所作事之内).
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Condition

Very good impression with well-registered colour. Minor toning, minor repaired wormhole, minor soiling in the centre and minor a loss at the bottom right margin. Good condition overall. Please check the images!
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About the print

Sukeroku is the great Edo swagger role: a otokodate who prowls the Yoshiwara at night in a black robe and a purple headband, picking fights with samurai for the pleasure of humiliating them, and who is in fact the Soga brother Soga no Gorō hunting for a stolen sword. Agemaki is the tayū he loves. The pair are as fixed in the Edo imagination as any couple on the kabuki stage, and the play was — and remains — one of the eighteen Ichikawa "great" pieces.

What makes the 1857 Nakamura-za version worth a print is that a single actor played both of them. Sukeroku sugata no uraume was a hengemono, a transformation dance built around hayagawari: Nakamura Fukusuke I went from Sukeroku to Agemaki to the white-haired antagonist Ikyū in a sequence of lightning changes. Kunisada's design puts two of those transformations in one frame — an impossibility on stage, and precisely the joke the audience was buying. Sukeroku leans in over his shoulder in the black haori and the murasaki headband, a flash of scarlet under-robe at the sleeve; Agemaki looks up past him, her hairpins radiating in a wide gold fan, her robes massed with pink and blue chrysanthemums. Above them, night-black sky and the Yoshiwara cherries in bloom.

Kunisada was seventy-one and still the designer Edo publishers went to for this kind of theatrical portraiture. The blue-grey ground, the deep black of the robe and the pale flesh tones are handled with the restraint of very late Kunisada; the sheet stands entirely on its own but belongs to a small set issued for the same production.