Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/320

 he fire that followed the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 destroyed one of the two sets of known drawings by Sharaku, those of wrestlers which Rumpf reproduces from previously obtained photographs. The other set, eight drawings of actors, which once were together in the collection of Pierre Barboutau of Paris, we believe still to exist, and these, therefore, must be counted as among the surviving works of the artist. The present whereabouts of five out of the eight has not been ascertained, and these can be shown only through rephotographing reproductions in the Barboutau Catalogue; the other three, however, are in American collections and consequently are among the originals exhibited.

The set has been studied with great care by Japanese as well as by foreign experts, and the inevitable conclusion seems to be that the drawings were made by Sharaku to be printed in a book that would record not actual stage scenes but various actors from the three leading theatres grouped together according to the fancy of the artist. No actor is portrayed more than once in the set. Changes in design are indicated by pasting the desired corrections over the parts to be altered and in some cases the mon of the actors seem to have been changed or written over with a probably later indication of the name or rôle which cannot always be shown to be correct.

Seven out of the eight drawings are appropriate for double-page illustrations and each of these shows the line of separation in the center. The eighth is half the width of the others and presumably would have been printed on the final single page of the book. This smaller sheet has the Sharaku signature pasted on and, according to the Barboutau Catalogue, it bears the seal of Toyokuni. In the reproduction we have rephotographed this seal is invisible, but its presence would indicate merely that at some time the drawing had been in the collection of one of Sharaku’s great contemporaries. Toyokuni and Sharaku occasionally made prints of the same subject, as in number 78 of this catalogue where reference is made to Toyokuni’s depiction of the same actor in the same rôle, and if our identification of number 146 is correct, still another connection between the two artists is indicated.

The signature pasted on the final sheet reads Sharaku gwa, not Tōshūsai Sharaku gwa, and if an analogy may be drawn from the prints, this fact would date the set not earlier than the eleventh month of 1794. In that