Onoe Matsusuke I as Ebisu, from The Stand-In Seven Gods of Good Fortune
Katsukawa Shunshō (Japanese, 1726–1792)
c. 1780
- Medium
- color woodblock print
- Classification
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 31.5 x 14 cm (12 3/8 x 5 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- Gift from J. H. Wade
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This print is from a group in which famous Kabuki theater actors who never performed together stand in for the Seven Gods of Good Fortune. Images of the Seven Gods symbolize hope for fortune in the coming year, and the set may have been made for the New Year of 1780. Here, Onoe Matsusuke I poses beneath curtains at the entrance to a place of business. They read, “House of Ebisu.” Ebisu is the god of fishermen, which may account for the wave imagery on the actor’s inner robe.
