Artist: Utagawa Kunisada 歌川国貞 (Toyokuni III, 1786–1865) Title: Kōjō 口上 — stage announcement, naming Nakamura Shikan Date: Man'en 1 / Ansei 7 (1860) Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and colour on paper Signature: Toyokuni ga 豊国画 in the red toshidama cartouche, with censor seal above Block cutter: Hori Masa 彫工政 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Condition Very good colors and impression. The paper has moderate toning and minor soiling. Please check the images! --------------------------------------------------------------------- THE PRINT Two actors kneel in formal dress on a red dais, hands flat on the floor in front of them, a sword laid at the right edge of the stage. The man on the right is mid-address, mouth set, looking out at the house; the man on the left has folded himself into a deep bow. Above them, filling the whole upper half of the sheet, runs the announcement text in heavy cursive, opening with the traditional call for silence — tōzai, tōzai — and going on to the business at hand: the assumption of a stage name, with reference to the late father's haimyō and to the theatre-going public of Edo's eight hundred and eight blocks. This is a kōjō, the formal announcement made from the stage at a name succession. They are a small and rather specialised corner of actor prints: no drama, no role, just two men bowing and a great deal of text. Kunisada, signing as Toyokuni III five years before his death, gives it exactly the restraint the occasion calls for and puts all the weight into the two faces. Sheets of this kind were printed as souvenirs of the ceremony, which makes them useful documents of theatre history and considerably rarer than the role portraits from the same run.