** The same design sold at Christie's on 16 September 2025, hammering at USD 1,270 against an estimate of USD 2,000–3,000. ** Artist: Utagawa Yoshitora 歌川芳虎 (act. c. 1836–1880s), signed Ichimōsai Yoshitora ga (一猛齋芳虎画) Title: Gappō-ga-Tsuji Adauchi no Zu — "The Vendetta at Gappō Crossroads" Source: Ehon Gappō-ga-Tsuji (絵本合法衢), the kabuki play first staged in 1810 Subject: Takahashi Yajūrō, driven up onto the great stone Enma figure at the Gappō crossroads after his revenge attempt fails, fighting off the constables below with their own catch-poles Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — nishiki-e (polychrome) Format: Ōban tate-e triptych (three sheets each approx. 36*24) Signature: Signed Ichimōsai Yoshitora ga (一猛齋芳虎画) on each sheet Carver's seal: Sansei 三清, on all three sheets -------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPRESSION & COLOURS A stunning impression. The colours are very well preserved and well saturated — very good overall. PAPER: Three separate ōban sheets. The paper is sound and supple with nothing significant to note. Only minor issues including minor loss on the margins and minor soiling. Some minor wormholes. Please check the images! --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Scene The scene is the moment a vendetta goes wrong. Takahashi Yajūrō's elder brother, an officer in the Taga household, had been killed by a colleague — Daigaku-no-suke, one of the men bleeding the family's lord dry. Yajūrō swore revenge, went into self-imposed exile, and waited. The chance came at the Gappō crossroads in Osaka, outside the Enma-dō, the hall of the king who judges the dead. He struck the palanquin. It was empty. Daigaku-no-suke had known he was coming. What Yoshitora chose to draw is not the killing but the aftermath: the failed assassin running, the constables closing, and Yajūrō scrambling up onto the colossal stone figure with nowhere left to go. He is barefoot, in a white robe with Namu Amida Butsu — the invocation of a man who has accepted his death — written down both sleeves in enormous characters. In each hand he holds a catch-pole taken off his pursuers, using their own tools against them. Below him the ground is a mass of struggling constables and retainers, several already down, more coming in from the fields on either side. The composition is a Kuniyoshi-school device worked at full scale: one immense object spanning all three sheets, unifying the design and dwarfing the figures. The statue is an invention of the stage, not a real monument, and Yoshitora carves it as a wall of grey drapery and swirling stone that turns the entire triptych into a single trap. The outer sheets open onto the flat rice country outside the city, straw stacks and reed thatch under a graded dawn sky — deliberate quiet against the violence in the middle. The play behind it, Ehon Gappō-ga-Tsuji, was notorious. It is one of the most brutal things written for the Edo stage: a cascade of murders working through the entire cast, with scarcely anyone left standing at the curtain. Prints from it are considerably less common than the well-worn Soga or Chūshingura vendetta subjects, and this design — the cornered man above, the mob below, the god of hell as the thing he is standing on — is the strongest image the play produced.