Who Was Sharaku? The Mystery Behind This Kabuki Portrait
One of the most famous kabuki portraits in Japanese art, by an artist who appeared in 1794, made bold prints for ten months, then vanished. Who was Sharaku?
A Famous Print by an Unknown Artist
This is one of the most famous portraits in all of ukiyo-e. It shows a kabuki actor named Ichikawa Ebizō, playing a samurai. His face is set. His hands are clenched. In the next moment of the play, his character will take his own life.
The strange part is the artist. We do not know who he was. He signed his work "Tōshūsai Sharaku," and that is almost all we know for certain.
Ten Months, Then Gone
Sharaku appeared out of nowhere in the summer of 1794. Over about ten months he made roughly 140 to 150 prints, most of them kabuki actors. Then he stopped. He never made another print, and he vanished from the record completely.
No one knows why he started, or why he stopped. The best guess scholars have is that "Sharaku" was a pen name for a man called Saitō Jūrobei, a Noh actor who served the lord of Awa. But the evidence is thin. It fits, but it is not proof. After more than two hundred years, we still do not know who Sharaku was.
Why His Prints Look Different
Most actor prints of the time flattered their subjects. Fans wanted their favorite stars to look handsome. Sharaku did the opposite. He drew actors as they really were, lines, odd features, and all.
He worked in a style called ōkubi-e, the "large-head" portrait: a close-up of the face and shoulders that fills the sheet. He set his actors against dark backgrounds dusted with mica, a mineral that gave the print a faint shimmer. His lines around the eyes and mouth are thick and bold. The result is not pretty. It is alive. You feel like you are looking at a real person caught in a real moment.
That honesty may be why he failed. People at the time found his prints too harsh, and they did not sell well. The actors he drew probably did not love them either. What buyers disliked then, the world now counts among the greatest portraits ever made in Japan.
His prints were published by Tsutaya Jūzaburō, one of the leading publishers in Edo, who was known for backing bold new artists.
What You Are Looking At
The print shows the actor Ichikawa Ebizō in the role of Takemura Sadanoshin, in a play from 1794. Ebizō was a star. He held the name Ichikawa Danjūrō, the most respected name in all of kabuki.
In this scene his character is a samurai facing an impossible choice, and he is about to die by his own hand. Sharaku puts all of that into the face and the hands. The tension is in the clenched fingers. You do not need to know the play to feel it.
Museums link this print to the play Koi Nyōbō Somewake Tazuna, "The Loved Wife's Parti-Coloured Reins."
The Print We Have
The print we carry is a reproduction of Sharaku's design. It is a real woodblock print, made by hand in the traditional way, not a machine copy. It measures about 388 by 263mm. It is pre-owned and shows some age, with a few spots and marks, which is normal for a print like this. The product page has photos of the exact condition.
You can see more Sharaku prints here. New to prints? Our guide on original, reprint, or reproduction explains the terms.
Sources
Tokyo National Museum — on Sharaku.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Ichikawa Ebizō as Takemura Sadanoshin.
Art Institute of Chicago — Ichikawa Ebizō IV as Takemura Sadanoshin.
British Museum — Sharaku actor portrait with mica ground.
John Fiorillo, Viewing Japanese Prints — on Sharaku.