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Ichikawa Yaozō III as the cripple Tanabe Bunzō.
The color of the costume is brick red and black, with touches of green in the cuffs.
This print bears a hand-written inscription giving the name of the actor and a date equivalent to the ninth month of 1794.
A considerable number of other prints in Sharaku’s series of bust-portraits on a dark mica ground exist in single, early impressions which are inscribed with the same date and apparently in the same calligraphy. There is a difference of four months between the time when these prints were issued and the date inscribed on them, but this date coincides with that of the time when the government edict against the further issuance of mica ground prints which we have discussed in our introductory essay, was about to be enforced and its prospective enforcement seems to have stimulated in the autumn of 1794 the purchase of those by Sharaku which had been published during the spring and summer. Some collector of the long ago apparently bought a number of them at the same time and inscribed them when he got them. For further discussion of these inscribed prints see number 15.
It is possible that there is a second state of this subject, but we believe that the differences discernible between different impressions are due to a large—too large—number having been taken from the original blocks. The most striking of these differences is in the disappearance of the line marking where the right hand folds over the left, and the absence of this is especially noticeable in the impression reproduced in the Vignier-Inada Catalogue number 277 which appears again as Rumpf number 7. The impressions reproduced by Kurth, Nakata and Noguchi are better, but at least two of these are from the same original and neither has the clarity or the early delicacy of the one shown here which was picked from three in American collections.
Ōban. Dark mica ground. Signed: Tōshūsai Sharaku.
Museum of Fine Arts (Spaulding Collection).
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