page_title: Sharaku
section_title: Reception and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Sharaku / Reception and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Page from Shotōzan Tenarai Hōjō in which a picture by Sharaku appears on a kite
context_page_description: Tōshūsai Sharaku was a Japanese ukiyo-e print designer, known for his portraits of kabuki actors. Neither his true name nor the dates of his birth or death are known. His active career as a woodblock artist spanned ten months; his prolific work met disapproval and his output came to an end as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun. His work has come to be considered some of the greatest in the ukiyo-e genre.
  Sharaku made mostly yakusha-e portraits of kabuki actors. His compositions emphasize poses of dynamism and energy, and display a realism unusual for prints of the time—contemporaries such as Utamaro represented their subjects with an idealized beauty, while Sharaku did not shy from showing unflattering details. This was not to the tastes of the public, and the enigmatic artist's production ceased in the first month of 1795. His mastery of the medium with no apparent apprenticeship has drawn much speculation, and researchers have long tried to discover his true identity—amongst the dozens of proposals, some suggest he was an obscure poet, others a Noh actor, or even the ukiyo-e master Hokusai.
context_section_description: The Edo public reacted poorly to Sharaku's portraits.  More copies of the larger, first-period works remain, suggesting they enjoyed greater popularity than the later works; most for which only a single copy remains come from the later periods.
  Contemporaries such as Utamaro who also worked in a relatively realistic style presented their subjects in a positive, beautifying way.  Sharaku did not avoid depicting less flattering aspects of his subjects—he was the "arch-purveyor of vulgarities" to 19th-century art historian Ernest Fenollosa.  An inscription on Utamaro's portrait of 1803 appears to target criticism at Sharaku's approach; appearing eight years after Sharaku's supposed disappearance suggests that Sharaku's presence was still somehow felt, despite his lack of acceptance.
  The subject of an Eishōsai Chōki portrait of Takashimaya O-Hisa holds a hand fan decorated with Sharaku's Kōshirō Matsumoto IV as Sakanaya Gorobee.  On a decorated kite illustrated in Jippensha Ikku's book Shotōzan Tenarai Hōjō (1796) appears Sharaku's depiction of kabuki actor Ichikawa Ebizō IV; the accompanying text is filled with puns, jargon, and double entendres that have invited interpretation as commentary on the decline of Sharaku's later works and events surrounding his departure from the ukiyo-e world, including speculation that he had been arrested and imprisoned.  Ikku published under Sharaku's publisher Tsutaya from late 1794, and the book is the earliest to mention Sharaku.  The Ukiyo-e Ruikō, the oldest surviving work on ukiyo-e, contains the oldest direct comment on Sharaku's work:
  "Sharaku designed likenesses of kabuki actors, but because he depicted them too truthfully, his prints do not conform to accepted ideas, and his career was short, ending after about a year."
  The Ukiyo-e Ruikō was not a published book, but a manuscript that was hand-copied over generations, with great variations in content, some of which has fueled speculation as to Sharaku's identity. including a version that calls Sharaku "Hokusai II". Shikitei Sanba wrote in 1802 of ukiyo-e artists, and included an illustration of active and inactive artists and their schools as a map; Sharaku appears as an inactive artist depicted as a solitary island with no followers.  Essayist Katō Eibian wrote in the early 19th century that Sharaku "should be praised for his elegance and strength of line".
  Sharaku's work was popular among European collectors, but rarely received mention in print until German collector Julius Kurth's book Sharaku appeared in 1910.  Kurth ranked Sharaku's portraits with those of Rembrandt and Velázquez, and asserted Sharaku was Noh actor Saitō Jūrōbei.  The book ignited international interest in the artist, resulting in a reevaluation that has placed Sharaku amongst the greatest ukiyo-e masters.  In his Chats on Japanese Prints of 1915 Arthur Davison Ficke declared, "Sharaku stands on the highest level of genius, in a greatness unique, sublime, and appalling."  The first in-depth work on Sharaku was Harold Gould Henderson and Louis Vernon Ledoux's The Surviving Works of Sharaku in 1939.  Certain portraits such as Ōtani Oniji  III are particularly well known.
  Just over 600 copies of Sharaku's prints are known; only about 100 remain in Japan.  As they are in collections scattered throughout the world general research on Sharaku's works has followed different threads in Japan and the West has proved time-consuming.  Japanese researchers have better knowledge of and access to documents and literature related to Sharaku's time and conditions.  On the other hand, Sharaku's works tend to be in Western collections, including prints for which only one copy is known—of which there are about three dozen.  Sharaku's ōban prints with mica backgrounds most likely cost more than the average, though prices can be only speculated due to a lack of records.  Values of the prints today vary depending on size, condition, and subjective quality.  Prices for them at auction have risen steadily from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: for a print with a mica backgro
caption: Sharaku's Ichikawa Ebizō IV appears on a kite on a page of Jippensha Ikku's Shotōzan Tenarai Hōjō (1796)
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