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Iwai Hanshirō IV not here in the rôle of Chihaya, younger sister of Kaneyoshi, in which he appears in number 70, but as in number 75 playing the part of Masashige’s sister Sakurai.
This attribution is based on the fact that Toyokuni in his famous series of actor portraits called “Yakusha Butai no Sugata-ye” shows Hanshirō in the same pose, with the same hood and the same dark background in the upper half. As the prints are approximately of the same date, the same rôle undoubtedly is depicted. The Toyokuni print differs from this one in that the design on the skirt of the kimono is the “Kiku-sui”—chrysanthemums over water—which was the crest of the Kusunoki family to which Sakurai belonged.
The color of the costume has been described merely as having the hood in black and the kimono in green.
The only known impression appears as plate 14a in Kurth’s Geschichte des japanischen Holzschnittes and is rephotographed from that as Rumpf number 129, and by Noguchi from whom we have rephotographed it.
Hosoye. Gray ground oxidized. Signed: Sharaku.
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