歌川国貞 — 稲葉小蔵の泥棒 — レア — 日本木版画 - Japan - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada I / Toyokuni III
Play: Nezumi Komon Haru no Shingata (鼠小紋東君新形), popularly known as Nezumi Kozō — by Kawatake Shinshichi II (later Mokuami), premiered on the 11th day of the 1st month of Ansei 4 (1857) at the Ichimura-za, Edo

Roles: Inaba Kōzō (稲葉幸藏) — the alias of the gentleman-thief Nezumi Kozō Jirokichi — in the red cartouche on the right sheet; the constables (torite, 捕人) named in the cartouche on the left sheet

Actor: The role was created by Ichikawa Kodanji IV (四代目市川小團次); the likeness follows his nigao [actor name not written on the sheet — see notes]

Date: Ansei 4 (1857), datable to the first run of the play; museum reference: Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University
Format: Ōban tate-e diptych — two sheets, each approx. 36 × 24 cm
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Condition: Very good colour and impression. Two minor wormholes, professionally repaired. Minor soiling and minor scuffs. Good condition overall. Please check the images!

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About the print

Nezumi Komon Haru no Shingata was one of the great hits of the late Edo stage. Kawatake Shinshichi II — later famous as Mokuami — built it from Shōrin Hakuen II's storyteller's version of the real Nezumi Kozō Jirokichi, a burglar executed in 1832 who robbed only daimyō mansions and passed the money to the poor. The play ran for more than a hundred days at the Ichimura-za on the strength of Ichikawa Kodanji IV's unusually naturalistic performance in the title role, and it effectively established the shiranami-mono, the thief play, as a genre in its own right.

Kunisada gives the confrontation rather than the pathos. The hero stands braced at the centre of the right sheet in a blue-and-white shibori sleeveless jacket over a bold black-and-pale-blue check, short sword drawn, one bare leg thrust out — and the constables come at him from below in a thicket of green bamboo poles and yellow ladder-staves, their matching red plaid uniforms and blue headbands turning the lower half of the composition into a single agitated mass. On the left sheet one of them has already been flipped clean off his feet and hangs upside down in the air, sword still in hand. Behind it all, nothing: a flat grey graded sky with snow falling in reserved white flecks.

That grey ground is what makes the design. By stripping out the setting entirely Kunisada isolates the figures against an empty winter night, so the eye reads the diptych as a single diagonal cascade from the tumbling constable at upper left down through the poles to the hero's planted stance at the right. It is a tachimawari — a stage fight — printed with the compression of the stage itself, and it belongs to the small group of Kunisada designs from the very end of his career in which the theatrical subject is carried almost entirely by silhouette and pattern.