Album of Actor Portraits (c. 1790–1810): Art, History and Details

Album of Actor Portraits (c. 1790–1810) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Shōrakusai (Japanese).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The paintings in this album show Kabuki actors costumed for their roles in a variety of plays. The characters are identified in the paper cartouches affixed to the paintings. While each painting is on silk that has been pasted into the album, the poems on some of the facing pages have been written in ink directly onto the page.

Object facts

• Title: Album of Actor Portraits
• Date: c. 1790–1810
• Creator attribution: Shōrakusai (Japanese)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Bound Volume
• Technique: accordion-style album; ink and color on silk mounted on paper and ink on paper
• Dimensions: Album, opened: 28.1 x 42 cm (11 1/16 x 16 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1988.105

A detail from the museum

This album contains paintings of Kabuki actors who performed in the city of Osaka.

Collection credit

Kelvin Smith Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “The Year in Review for 1988.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (February 1989): 30–75.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.