国貞 • 早期歌舞伎の傑作 • 市川団十六世が角川本蔵を演じる • 日本木版画 - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞, 1786–1865)
Title: 加古川本蔵 — Kakogawa Honzō, played by Ichikawa Danzō VI (市川團藏, haimyō Sanen 三猿, 1800–1871)
Series: Konjaku Kabuki Meiyū 今昔歌舞伎名優 (Famous Actors Past and Present) — untitled on the sheet; also catalogued as Kinshōdō-ban yakusha ōkubi-e

Publisher: Ebisuya Shōshichi (恵比寿屋庄七), gō Kinshōdō 錦昇堂 — publisher's seal at lower left
Carver: Hori Ryūzō / Chōkō Ryūzan 彫工柳三 — carver's seal beside the title cartouche
Date: 1860; the standard edition of this design is recorded with a 3/1860 date seal
Technique: Nishiki-e woodblock print on paper, deluxe printing with bokashi and burnishing
Format: Ōban tate-e; approx. 36*24 cm
Reference: Laura Mueller, Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School, Hotei Publishing, 2007, no. 140 (standard edition of this design); Andreas Marks, Publishers of Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Compendium, 2011, p. 112 (publisher)
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Condition: Good colours and a strong impression. The paper shows notable trimming at the right margin, approximately 2cm, extending into the artist's seal; the main composition remains well preserved. There is minor soiling, an area of ink transfer in the centre, and soiling at the margins. Good condition overall. The sheet is printed on a premium washi that responds well to cleaning if wished. Please check the images!
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About the print:

The head fills the sheet. That is the first thing, and for a print of 1860 it is the whole argument: Kunisada crops so close that the skull runs off the top of the block, the ear touches the right edge, and there is no room left for anything but the face. Ōkubi-e were a late-eighteenth-century Edo invention, banned outright by the shogunate around 1800, and only slowly readmitted; what Kunisada does here in the last years of his life is push the format further than Utamaro or Toyokuni I ever did, cropping tighter and letting the sheer scale of the head do the work.

The face is worth the attention. Danzō VI was a tachiyaku known for a heavy, unglamorous physical presence, and Kunisada gives him a set jaw, a downturned mouth cut in two clean strokes, a shadowed chin, and — the feature museums use to identify him in prints — those wide, protruding eyes, thrown hard to the left at something outside the frame. It is not a handsome portrait and was never meant to be. Set against it is the colour: a magenta-to-purple bokashi ground of a kind almost nobody was printing in 1860, gold-ochre brocade with browned floral roundels, indigo lattice, a stripe of pale blue at the collar. The magenta and purple are the new imported pigments that would go on to define the Meiji palette a decade later; in 1860 they were startling, and Kunisada uses them here with an aggression that reads as entirely deliberate.

Kakogawa Honzō is the retainer of the Kanadehon Chūshingura who physically restrains Enya Hangan mid-strike in Act III — the intervention that prevents Hangan from killing Moronao outright, and therefore the act that sets the entire revenge plot in motion. He spends the rest of the play paying for it, eventually walking into his own son-in-law's blade in the guise of a mendicant monk. He is not one of the forty-seven, and in most treatments he is a supporting figure. Here the hierarchy is simply inverted: the character is secondary, and the portrait is not.
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About the Setsugekka series:

Konjaku Kabuki Meiyū was conceived in Kunisada's mid-seventies as the culmination of a fifty-year career — a survey of the great kabuki actors of the past and of his own day, at a level of production quality no Edo publisher had attempted for actor prints in living memory. Ebisuya Shōshichi (Kinshōdō) issued the sheets between 1860 and roughly 1865, with the cost reportedly underwritten by the Mitani copper and iron merchant family, and engaged the finest available block-cutters — the carver Ryūzō's seal appears throughout the series — with lavish burnishing, gloss overprinting, embossing, and pigments chosen without regard to expense. John Fiorillo has drawn the comparison with the deluxe limited-edition chūban prints made in Osaka around the same period, the world of Hirosada; Osaka artists passed regularly through Kunisada's studio, and the debt in format and ambition is hard to miss.

The project was never finished. Of the 150 designs planned, 72 published sheets are known, 12 of them by Utagawa Yoshitora, who joined in 1862 — the usual explanation being that Kunisada, then in his late seventies, needed help or was already ill. He died in January 1865. Two proof prints and two preparatory drawings bring the total recorded compositions to 76. The series is generally regarded as the finest body of actor prints Kunisada produced, and its influence runs directly into Toyohara Kunichika's ōkubi-e of the following decades."})