Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/270

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anogawa Ichimatsu III as Shizuhata, the younger sister of Hata Daizen Taketora whose portrait we have in number 112 as he appeared in a jōruri episode of this same production.

The coloring of the costume is in green, yellow, faded violet and faded rose. The foreground is yellow.

This print and the one that follows it seem to have some connection with numbers 106, 107 and 108, as all five have a definite and perhaps continuous foreground as well as blossoming branches at the top. We place these two separately, however, because of various differences between them and the other three. Perhaps the most prominent difference is that the plum blossoms at the top of the two now under discussion are printed in color and with a black outline, besides which they are on larger branches. In some of the five it is difficult to tell with certainty if the grounds originally were left untinted or had been lightly overprinted with pale gray.

The Vignier-Inada Catalogue, number 296, which Rumpf rephotographs for his number 103 and Noguchi uses, arranges this print and the next as the central and right-hand sheets of a triptych and suggests that the left-hand sheet which is lost probably represented a ghost. The suggestion is a plausible one but neither from the prints that have survived nor from what little is known of the play can it be positively confirmed or denied. The impression we exhibit is the only one in America.

Hosoye. Grayish ground with plum branches above. Signed: Sharaku.

Museum of Fine Arts (Spaulding Collection).

rashi Ryūzō probably as Ōtomo no Yamanushi, who, according to the contemporary Yakusha Ninsō Kagami in this play pretends to be the prince Koretaka whom we have seen disguised in numbers 108 and 109.