The Actor's Image

by Timothy Clark

The "floating world"--the closely related pleasure and entertainment districts of Tokyo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--embodied and idealized fashion, chic, and urbanity for its habitués, and inspired a profusion of woodblock prints depicting renowned courtesans and adored matinee idols. Considered ephemera in their time, these prints are treasured works of art today. In this volume of "floating world prints" ( ukiyo-e ), the authors present a selection of Kabuki actor portraits and theater scenes from The Art Institute of Chicago's world-renowned Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints. Together with interpretive essays that place the prints in their historical and cultural context, the authors offer a catalog of 880 prints, 136 of them in color, containing the most complete and up-to-date information available about each print.


Donald Jenkins's essay explains printmaking and explores the lives and milieu of the Katsukawa school print makers. Timothy Clark, in his essay, vividly depicts the world of Kabuki theater and describes a particular production of a popular play, from the vantage points of various participants. Osamu Ueda has provided dates and identification for the subjects of many of the prints in the collection, as well as biographies of the leading Kabuki actors and brief lives of the printmakers of the Katsukawa school.

504 pages, Hardcover

First published May 2, 1994

About the author

Timothy Clark is a British curator and scholar specializing in Japanese art. He served at the British Museum from 1988 to 2019, including many years as Head of the Japanese Section overseeing a vast collection. An expert on Edo and Meiji period paintings and prints, he has curated major exhibitions and authored numerous studies. He later became an Honorary Research Fellow and received Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun for promoting Japanese culture in the United Kingdom.