context: painting > prints > artists

Toshusai Sharaku, active 1794-95

The actors Nakamura Konozo and Nakajima Wadaemon in Character

Sharaku burst on the scene in 1794, and just 150 kabuki prints and ten months later was gone again. I've read half a dozen speculations as to why*. They all sound plausible. They are all fictions. The one that seems to have most virtues and fewest faults suggests that he was a Noh actor with artistic training who was kind of marooned in Edo for ten months, and left at a time that would fit with the end of the print career and the start of a new Noh touring season. I like this one particularly because it gives a new flavour to the merciless caricaturing of the actors we see in all of Sharaku's work, something that goes beyond the word the critics always seem to use, 'unidealised'. He offers onnagata who look like middle-aged men, sometimes hefty ones, unattractive character actors, ridiculous expressions. Much as I love the results, I find it easy to see an upper-class sneer as an element of their energy. Ultimately these speculations on origins are pointless - the work has a force that doesn't depend on such knowledge.

Since the first release of this page, I've read another, by Nelly Delay, who says his work was "...so realistic that he was suspected of stealing their souls. He was murdered." She offers no evidence for this, but if you're going to take a guess, you might as well go wild.

backwards: shunsho

forwards: utamaro