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Yamashina Shirōjūrō as Nagoya Sanzayemon whose demise early in the action furnished a motive for the revenge finally accomplished by his son. In the print he is wearing the sword that is seen again in number 46 being drawn by the man who killed him.
He is shown in a kimono of yellow-green worn under a kamishimo once pale blue on which are flowers in bluish green. The white fan has a design in deep rose and what seemingly was once pale blue. The all-important swords he wears have hilt wrappings of blue-green, mountings of golden yellow and scabbards of deep rose.
We place the print as the right-hand sheet of a possible triptych.
Like two or three of the other subjects described in the preceding pages, there was no impression of this print in Paris when the Vignier-Inada Catalogue was compiled; but the copy inscribed with the actor’s name which first came to notice in the dealer’s advertisement to which reference has been made, remained in Germany and was reproduced in Kurth, Rumpf number 91, various Japanese books and the Straus-Negbaur Sale Catalogue. This impression is now in Chicago. In it the hair is somewhat better printed than it is in the impression we exhibit, but to those of us who made the difficult choice between two excellent prints—and no third is known—the color in the one selected seemed of a finer tone.
Hosoye. Yellow ground. Signed: Tōshūsai Sharaku.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Church Collection).
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