Actor Onoe Matsunosuke IV as Nozarashi Chobei, from the series Collection of Portraits by Shunsen

1925

The twentieth-century artist Natori Shunsen brought a new degree of realism to the old tradition of Kabuki portraiture. Unlike his predecessors, whose prints advertised the latest productions and targeted theater fans, Shunsen often portrayed actors in past roles and produced and marketed his prints more deliberately as works of art. Shunsen was part of a revival movement, called shin-hanga (“new prints”), which promoted traditional methods of color woodblock printing for representation of more modern subjects and styles. The actor portrayed here was trained in Kabuki but made the transition to film, where he pioneered the ninja movie genre and became Japan’s first movie star.