In the earlier portion of Sharaku's work, among which are his large portraits on yellow backgrounds, the originality of the man is already striking enough; but his acid qualities are hardly at their fullest development. Certain of his _hoso-ye_ prints must belong to this first period; in these, after the manner of Shunsho, he devoted his attention chiefly to the attaining of a powerful dramatic rendering of the rôle he was depicting. Strutting Daimyo, beguiling woman, ferocious warrior, shrewd peasant--he made each part move with the vigour and force of the seen stage. Shunsho was never more impressive; and here, in addition, there is in every design a strange distortion of line, a disturbing abnormality of pose, that makes one realize that no mere copyist of Shunsho is at hand. Then, beginning with an astounding series of twenty-four portraits with mica backgrounds (Plates 42, 43, 44) representing actors in the play of the Forty-seven Ronin, Sharaku's mood changes. He ceases to remind one at all of Shunsho; it is rather the scrutinizing individual characterization of Shunyei that he recalls. But Shunyei never reached the point to which Sharaku is now coming. The dramatic force, the histrionic illusion of his pictures abates no jot; but beyond it, disturbing lights and movements are lurking. The mighty rôle towers like a shadow before us in its full dramatic sweep; but from the depths of the shadow peers with stealthy glance the indwelling personality of the actor--like a jackal's eyes seen suddenly in a king's tomb. This contradiction--this complex of two utterly antagonistic forces--is one of the miracles of Sharaku's genius: it is an antinomy which he resolves sufficiently to produce an equilibrium, but not enough to take from these portraits the insoluble mystery of two spirits, the tangle of two meanings, the explosive and inscrutable life that makes them unforgettable. Thus the sweeping rhetoric of the stately rôle and the sudden naturalistic cry of the discovered actor's soul meet in a discord unique, subtly calculated, magnificent, and harrowing. Sharaku pierced deep into the hearts of his sitters to grasp the weak, the grotesque, the pathetic, the tragic; he appraised the lust, the horror, the vacuity that was there, and these qualities he dragged out to the light through the avenues by which he had entered--through the eyes, the lips, the hands--tearing these gates into terrible and distorted breaches eloquent of the booty that had been forced through them. No portraits so blasting as his have ever been created by another; no other hand has so devastatingly shattered the conventional contours of faces to reshape them into the awful images of their own hidden potentialities. [Illustration: SHARAKU: THE ACTOR ISHIKAWA DANJURO (YEBIZO) AS THE DAIMYO KO NO MORONAO IN THE DRAMA OF THE FORTY-SEVEN RONIN. Size 14 × 10. Silver background. Signed _Toshiusai Sharaku ga_. _Plate 43._]