ART

A portrait of 18th-Century kabuki actor Sakata Hangoro III by Toshusai Sharaku has been sold for $462,000, a world record price for a Japanese print and double the presale estimate, reports Christie’s auction house in New York. The print, from the 1790s, shows the actor in the role of a villain. The purchaser, an unidentified Japanese buyer, also paid $418,000--twice the estimate --for Eishosai Choki’s print, “A Manservant Clearing the Snow from the Footwear of a Beauty.” The prints were from the collection of Theodor Scheiwe, a West German lumber industrialist who died in 1983.