Toyokuni I: Dramatic half-length double portrait of Bando Hikosaburo III and Nakamura Noshio III

Artist: Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825)Title: The kabuki actors Bando Hikosaburo III as Fujitaro and Nakamura Noshio II as Imayo Uta Bikuni  Date: 1796 Imayo uta Bikuni wears a traveling hat and hair covering, her sleeve covering her hand. Posed dramatically to the right, Fujitaro holds high a lamp and looks sternly down at her, obviously displeased or suspicious. This work is from Toyokuni’s finest artistic period of the 1790s, a period that is often considered the golden age of ukiyo-e. There are two similar portraits in the Baur Collection (G127 and G128), and according to Matthi Forrer, there was a group of at least fifteen half-length double portraits issued by this publisher in 1796, many against a grey ground, as here. They feature actors in plays in three of Edo’s theaters in the fall of 1796. As none of the prints have a censor’s seal (as required by law at the time for works for public sale), it has been surmised that this group may have been privately commissioned by kabuki f