Artist: Utagawa Kunisada I / Toyokuni III 歌川国貞・三代豊国 (1786–1865), signed Toyokuni ga 豊国画 in the Utagawa toshidama cartouche Title: the two roles named in cartouches at the upper right — 曽我五郎時宗 Soga Gorō Tokimune and 曽我十郎祐成 Soga Jūrō Sukenari Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print) on washi, with fine-line hair carving and a deep, evenly printed black ground Format: Ōban tate-e, single sheet, approx. 36 × 24.5 cm Block-cutter: Red carver's seal beside the signature, reading Hori Yasu 彫安 Date: Late Edo, with a round aratame-type censor and date seal Genre: Yakusha-e — kabuki actor print, Soga-mono ---------------------------------------------- Paper & condition Outstanding — museum grade. Superb impression with striking, entirely unfaded colour, the blacks and deep indigo especially strong and evenly printed. Please study the images. ---------------------------------------------- About the print The two Soga brothers, close up and at night. Their story was the most reliable subject in the Edo theatre: in 1193 Sukenari and Tokimune, aged twenty-one and nineteen, broke into the lodging of Kudō Suketsune during Yoritomo's great hunt at the foot of Mount Fuji and killed the man who had murdered their father when they were small children. It was counted one of Japan's three great vendettas alongside the forty-seven rōnin and the Igagoe revenge, and by the late eighteenth century all three of Edo's major theatres would open the New Year with a version of it. Kunisada gives it entirely in faces and cloth against a black ground: the elder Jūrō above, sharp-eyed and turning, in a robe scattered with the flying plovers that were his fixed emblem on stage; the younger, hot-headed Gorō below, in the butterfly pattern that was equally his, his face drawn with the red lines of kumadori makeup. A single plover crosses the night sky above them. A third figure and the edge of a black lacquer object appear at the left, where the design continued onto the adjoining sheet.