Kabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai Hanshirō

Kabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai Hanshirō

Utagawa Toyokuni I

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Toyokuni employed various figure arrangements—a single actor, or two actors shown standing or from the waist up. Here, two actors occupy almost the entire sheet, which is rare in Toyokuni's theatrical prints. The actors, Bandō Mitsugorō in a male role and Iwai Hanshirō in a female role, stand close together under a large umbrella, dominating the small space. The rounded, almost drooping upper-right corners of the characters in the artist's signature suggest a date of about 1800, when the forms and lines of Toyokuni's images, in contrast, started to become a little more rigid.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Kabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai HanshirōKabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai HanshirōKabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai HanshirōKabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai HanshirōKabuki Actors: Bando Mitsugorō and Iwai Hanshirō

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.