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It would be pleasant to say with assurance that this remarkable fan is a portrait of Toyokuni by Sharaku; but a catalogue must sometimes seek safety in equivocations and qualifying clauses, and the drawings of actors made to be cut on wood-blocks give insufficient evidence as to the quality of Sharaku’s original brush work to enable anyone to say with certainty that the painting now under consideration which seems to us far finer in that particular, is by him. We believe that it is, but we cannot establish the fact.
Our photograph is from a reproduction of the fan which appeared with an article about it in the November 1932 issue of Ukiyo-ye Geijutsu. The author, Muneshige Narasaki, does not give the name of the owner but does say that the original is in Matsukase, Ise. He describes the portrait as that of an elderly looking man of the Tea-Master or Haiku-Poet type. He fails, as we do, to see the significance of the white doll figure of a child, or to identify the object beneath its outstretched right hand. The print on which it is standing is signed Toyokuni and bears the name of a publisher which Mr. Narashige reads Maru-kyū. He considers the subject of the print to be O-Han and Chōyemon and very tentatively tries to connect this with the production of a play about them in 1803. If we could see an actual impression of the print itself and could identify the actors, this dating might be possible to confirm or disprove; but having before us only the photograph of a not very clear reproduction of an ink copy, we can do no more than call attention to the fact that the story of Chōyemon was a favorite on the Kabuki stage and that Sharaku himself made prints for a production of it in 1794. (See numbers 36 to 39 of this catalogue.)
Our identification of the portrait as representing Toyokuni (1769–1825) is based on its similarity to a bust-portrait of that artist which is reproduced as the right-hand cut on plate 17 of the first volume of Succo’s Toyokuni. The contours of the two faces are the same, the bushy eyebrows are the same, but the most striking resemblance between the two is in the deep lines about the nose and mouth. The portrait on the fan is of an older man whose face has become more deeply furrowed, but the
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