YOSHITOSHI . 勇敢的战士 . 源頼光 . 正宗日本木版画 . 浮世绘 - 日本 - Meiji period (1868-1912)

Artist: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 月岡芳年 (1839–1892)
Title: 源頼光 阪田公時 — Minamoto no Yorimitsu (Raikō) and Sakata no Kintoki

Series: Yoshitoshi Musha Burui 芳年武者无類 — "Yoshitoshi's Courageous Warriors," 33 designs, 1883–1886
Date: Meiji 19 (1886) — the National Diet Library dates this design to 1886
Publisher: Tsunajima Kamekichi 綱島亀吉, Nihonbashi-ku Bakurochō; publisher and artist address columns printed in the left margin
Signature: Yoshitoshi 芳年 with red artist's seal
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome nishiki-e
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm, full sheet with margins
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Condition

Very good colour and impression with some minor soiling visible on the bottom right margin. Remnants of tape at the top margins. The paper is firm and subtle. Very good overall! Please check the images!
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The Scene

Raikō is out hunting in the Ashigara mountains — bow in one hand, quiver of white-fletched arrows at his shoulder, a broad travelling hat slung behind him, a waterfall threading down the green ravine at his back. He has stopped and is looking down. What he is looking at is Kintoki.

Everyone in Japan knows Kintarō. The Golden Boy: a plump, ruddy-cheeked child in a red bib, wrestling bears on the mountainside, endlessly reproduced on Boy's Day banners and confectionery wrappers. Yoshitoshi throws all of it out. His wild child of Ashigara squats on the ground, squat and heavy-bellied, his skin covered in a dense pelt of hair drawn strand by strand, a straggle of black hair to his shoulders, a girdle of leaves at his waist — and an expression that is not cute, not fierce, but faintly sullen and not obviously intelligent. He looks like something found rather than something born.

That is the whole point of the encounter. This is the moment Raikō discovers the feral boy who will become Sakata no Kintoki, one of the four Shitennō — the great retainers who will help him kill the demon of Ōeyama. Yoshitoshi asks the viewer to look at the creature on the ground and see the future hero in it, which is a much harder and more interesting proposition than another picture of a rosy child hugging a bear. Set against the courtly restraint of Raikō's pale robe and the delicate green of the ravine, the contrast does the work.
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The Series

't Yoshitoshi Musha Burui comprises thirty-three ōban designs issued between 1883 and 1886, begun by the publisher Kobayashi Tetsujirō and continued by Tsunajima Kamekichi. Produced at the height of Yoshitoshi's fame — in 1885 he was ranked first among all living ukiyo-e artists in the Tōkyō ryūkō saikenki — the series revisits the great heroes of Japanese history with the full maturity of his draughtsmanship: disciplined compositions, superb textile and armour detail, and a colour sense far subtler than the aniline excesses of the surrounding decade.

Yoshitoshi trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi and is widely regarded as the last great master of ukiyo-e. Impressions of this design are held by the National Diet Library, Tokyo, among other collections.