Utagawa Toyokuni I (初代歌川豊国) (artist 1769 – 02/24/1825)
Sawamura Gennosuke I (澤村源之助) as Obiya Chōemon ( 帯や長右衛門)
09/1807
9.8 in x 14.4 in (Overall dimensions) color woodblock print
Signed: Toyokuni ga (豊国画)
Publisher: Miyakawaya Seiemon
(Marks 328 -seal 16-011)
Censor's seal: kiwame
Lyon Collection - another Toyokuni I of this actor with his crest prominently displayed
Kunitachi College of Music Library (via Ritsumeikan University)
Drexel Museum "The bodies of Obiya Chōemon, a man aged about fifty, and Shinanoya Ohan, a girl of fourteen or fifteen, were found floating in the Katsura River some time before 1728, when the first of many plays and lyrical ballads about them was produced, at the Sanjūrō-za in Ōsaka... It turned out that they had in fact been murdered by a robber, but popular fancy soon made the affair into a double suicide, for which various explanations were invented."
Quoted from: Images of Eighteenth-century Japan: Ukiyoe Prints from the Sir Edmund Walker Collection by David Waterhouse, Royal Ontario Museum, 1975, page 208. (This print is not shown. Instead is the image of Ohan and Choemon in a hashira-e from the 1790s by Utamaro.)
****
This print has seen better days. It is soiled, torn, worn and faded. But even as it is, the figure of Gennosuke I could be identified, not by the printed text in the upper right, but by this actor's personal crest, a partial chrysanthemum flower, seen in a circular pattern. It is what decorates his under-robe and can be seen clearly on the front of the lower part of his costume.
actor prints (yakusha-e - 役者絵) (genre)
Mikawaya Seiemon (三河屋清右衛門) (publisher)
Sawamura Gennosuke I (初代沢村源之助: 1/1791 to 10/1811) (actor)