Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Natori Shunsen began his career as an illustrator, designing two prints for the publisher Watanabe Shosaburo in 1916 and 1917. They would not collaborate again until 1925, when they began this series of thirty-six actor prints. Produced in a limited edition of one hundred and fifty prints, they were sold by subscription. The series was completed in 1929 and exhibited for the first time in Toldeo, Ohio, in 1930.

His reputation now well established, Shunsen continued to produce prints and another series with Watanabe in the early 1950s. Two years after the unexpected death of his daughter in 1958, Shunsen and his second wife committed suicide on the site of the family grave in Tokyo.