Kabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai Hanshirō

Toyokuni employed various figure arrangements—a single actor, or two actors shown standing or from the waist up. Here, two actors occupy almost the entire sheet, which is rare in Toyokuni's theatrical prints. The actors, Bandō Mitsugorō in a male role and Iwai Hanshirō in a female role, stand close together under a large umbrella, dominating the small space. The rounded, almost drooping upper-right corners of the characters in the artist's signature suggest a date of about 1800, when the forms and lines of Toyokuni's images, in contrast, started to become a little more rigid.

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Steel, 1960