Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Onnagata Actor Nakamura Rikō I as Oniō nyōbō Tsukisayo and Ichikawa Yaozō III as Oniō Shinzaemon
Katsukawa Shunkō Japanese
Not on view
In the lineage of Katsukawa artists—who dominated actor print production in the late eighteenth century and created the convention of “likeness portraits” (nigao-e) that transformed the genre—Shunkō was the first student of the founder, Shunshō. While he was signing actor, sumo, and beauty prints with his own name by the early 1770s, Shunkō’s activities as print artist were cut short when he suffered a stroke in his mid-forties.
This diptych (or part of a triptych) captures a scene from New Year’s Flowers: An Ichikawa Soga Play (Hatsuhana Mimasu Soga), one of the countless Kabuki plays that riffs on the medieval vendetta narrative Tale of the Soga Brothers. Oniō Shinzaemon, portrayed here with his wife, is a retainer of Soga Jūrō, one of the protagonists of the story and its theatrical versions.
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