Utagawa Yoshimori (歌川芳盛, 1830–1884) Kōetsu Ōkassen (甲越大合戦) — The Great Battle of Kai and Echigo Depicting Takeda Sama-no-suke Nobushige on the field at Kawanakajima Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e) on Japanese washi Date: Genji 1 (1864) — ko (子) date seal visible on each sheet Format: Ōban tate-e triptych (大判三枚続) — three full sheets, approx. 36 × 73 cm (14.2 × 28.7 in.) overall ----------------------------------------------------------------- Impression & Colours: Excellent. A strong, crisp impression throughout with fine keyblock lines preserved in the intricate armour lacing, the textile patterns of the foot soldiers' robes, and the meticulous carving of the faces. The colour palette is remarkably well-preserved and unusually sombre for the period — deep sooty greys in the night sky, warm ochre and brick-red in the smoke of distant burning villages, dark greens, indigo, and muted earth tones in the armour, with vivid red kumadori-style stripes accenting the warriors' faces. The bokashi gradation in the smoke and sky is beautifully applied. The black pigment holds dense and unfaded across all three sheets. Paper: Very Good. Three separate ōban sheets on firm Japanese washi. Some trimming and minor creases to the margins outside the image area — nothing affecting the composition itself. The sheets remain supple and the image area is clean throughout. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The Scene — A Night on the Plain of Kawanakajima This is one of the most arresting battle triptychs of its decade, and one of the strangest. The centre panel is dominated by a mounted samurai — identified in the blue cartouche as Takeda Sama-no-suke — wheeling his dark bay horse through the carnage of the battlefield, sword half-drawn from its scabbard, his face contorted in a rictus of rage. A trampled enemy lies beneath the horse's hooves, his own face twisted into a death-grimace, staring blankly upward. At left, two Takeda retainers regroup, one of them bleeding from a head wound, his white headband stained red, his eyes exhausted and hollow. At right, another pair of foot soldiers brace behind a red-and-white spear, their features locked in grim defiance. Behind them, the horizon burns. A village in the distance is consumed by flame, dark silhouettes of fleeing figures and charging infantry scattering across the middle ground. The sky rolls with great scrolls of black and ochre smoke, stylised into coiling curls that feel almost calligraphic. The entire image is pitched at night, or in that half-lit moment just before dawn when the fires of burning villages still light the sky — a deliberately moody, nocturnal palette that has nothing in common with the bright vermillions and aniline purples that dominated Edo printmaking in 1864. The 甲越 ("Kōetsu") of the title is the compound of Kai (甲斐) and Echigo (越後) — the rival provinces of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin, whose armies met five times on the plain of Kawanakajima between 1553 and 1564. The fourth of these battles, fought on the tenth day of the ninth month of 1561, was one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire Sengoku period — and it was on that field that Takeda Nobushige, the very figure at the centre of this composition, was killed leading the pursuit of Uesugi forces. Yoshimori captures not a moment of glory but a moment of exhaustion and terror: the war-mood itself, written across the faces of men who have seen too much. -------------------------------------------------------- A Different Kind of Face — Yoshimori's Stylistic Anomaly Anyone who looks at enough Utagawa warrior prints from the 1860s will feel, immediately, that something about this triptych is off. The faces are not quite right. They do not resemble the faces of Kuniyoshi's other students — not Yoshitora, not Yoshiiku, not even Yoshitoshi in his earliest Suikoden sheets. They have a stylised, almost mask-like quality: heavy lines, blunt modelling, bold red kumadori-style streaks more typical of aragoto kabuki makeup than of battlefield portraiture. The palette is equally anomalous: greys, browns, sooty blacks, and muted greens, with none of the bright aniline reds and purples that the Meiji-bound Utagawa school was by this date embracing with enthusiasm. The explanation lies in Yoshimori's peculiar biography. Born Taguchi Sakuzō in 1830, he trained under Kuniyoshi in the orthodox Utagawa manner and emerged as a specialist in battle scenes and satirical prints. But he was also one of the earliest practitioners of Yokohama-e — the genre of prints depicting foreigners and foreign things that blossomed after Yokohama was opened to foreign trade in 1859 — and he travelled frequently between Edo and Yokohama, where he observed Western visual conventions first-hand. Later in life he drifted further still from the Utagawa mainstream, becoming affiliated with the Nanga (南画) or "Southern School" of literati painting, with its strong debt to Chinese ink painting and scholarly aesthetics. By the end of his career he was producing bird-and-flower paintings for export, in a manner closer to Chinese tradition than to ukiyo-e. This triptych, dated 1864, sits at a fascinating crossroads in that trajectory. The compositional logic is still Utagawa — Kuniyoshi's dynamic diagonals, his crowded foreground, his love of the dramatic mounted figure. But the surface treatment has already begun to wander. The stylised smoke-scrolls echo Chinese painting conventions; the muted, nocturnal palette anticipates the sumi-tinted atmospheres of Yoshitoshi's later masterpieces; the stark, almost primitivist faces prefigure the caricatural energy that would explode into Meiji newspaper illustration a decade later. It is the work of an artist whose eye was already elsewhere — and the result is a warrior print unlike any other of its year. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Utagawa Yoshimori — The Elusive Student of Kuniyoshi Utagawa Yoshimori (1830–1884), born Taguchi Sakuzō and also known as Kuniharu Yoshimori, is one of the most intriguing figures of the late Kuniyoshi workshop. A pupil of the great master from a young age, he worked alongside the more celebrated Yoshitoshi, Yoshitora, and Yoshiiku, but cultivated a quieter and more eclectic career. Like his teacher, he ranged across genres — warrior prints, historical scenes, landscapes, bird-and-flower subjects — but he is most often associated today with Yokohama-e, the new genre depicting the foreigners and novelties that began arriving in Japan from 1859 onwards. Yoshimori used many signatures and pen names across his career — Ikkansai, Ikkōsai, Ikkeisai, and others — and his output, though substantial, is harder to track than that of his more prolific peers. After the Meiji Restoration he relocated to Yokohama, where he reportedly became affiliated with the Nanga school of Southern Chinese-style painting, producing ink and colour works for the growing Western export market. He died in 1884 at the age of fifty-four. His students included a Yoshimori II and a Koyomori; but his real legacy lies in prints like this one, in which the orthodox Utagawa warrior vocabulary begins to break down and recombine with influences from outside the school.