Watanabe Nobukazu

Watanabe Nobukazu (渡辺延一, 1874-1944), who signed many of his prints under the artist name Yōsai Nobukazu (楊斎延一), was a Meiji-era ukiyo-e print designer whose career was built almost entirely on the surge of patriotic visual culture that accompanied Japan's late nineteenth-century wars of empire. Trained in Tokyo as a pupil of Toyohara Chikanobu, one of the leading sensō-e (war print) and bijin-ga designers of the period, Watanabe Nobukazu followed his teacher's lead into the lucrative market for triptych war prints, imperial ceremonial scenes, and bijin-ga produced in vast numbers for an urban public hungry for visual reports of state events and military campaigns. He was, in the words of the print historian Richard Lane and later researchers, one of the half-dozen most prolific Meiji sensō-e specialists, and his triptychs of land and naval engagements in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars circulated widely in Tokyo, Osaka, and the provinces between 1894 and 1905.

Born in Tokyo in 1874 to a family with no recorded artistic background, Watanabe Nobukazu entered Chikanobu's studio while still a teenager. Chikanobu, himself a former Tokugawa retainer who had taken up the Utagawa-school print idiom, had by the 1880s become the publisher Tsunajima Kamekichi's most reliable designer of imperial procession prints, court-life bijin-ga, and battle triptychs. Working alongside his teacher gave the young Nobukazu access to a publishing infrastructure that demanded steady, fast output and rewarded designers who could compose the standard sensō-e triptych: foreground heroes in Western-style military uniforms, a dramatic middle ground of advancing infantry or naval fire, and a distant horizon of smoke, mountains, or sea. By the early 1890s Nobukazu had begun signing prints independently, generally as 'Yōsai Nobukazu,' with the studio name suggesting his teacher's lineage through the late Edo painter Kikuchi Yōsai whose historical-figure paintings Chikanobu admired and adapted.

His first sustained body of work belongs to the imperial ceremonial genre that boomed in Tokyo print shops during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Two 1892 triptychs of the imperial Phoenix Carriage departing the palace for military reviews at Aoyama, now held in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, are characteristic. They depict the imperial procession in scrupulous documentary detail, with court officials in European-cut uniforms, ranks of mounted cavalry, and the Emperor's gilt carriage rendered as the visual climax of the composition. Such prints functioned as state-aligned visual reporting on the rituals of the new constitutional monarchy and were aimed at a public for whom the Emperor's reviewable presence was still a recent and novel phenomenon. The print of 'Shigemori and Yoshihira Battling outside the Shishinden Palace,' issued the same year by the publisher Yokoyama Ryōhachi, shows Nobukazu working in the parallel genre of musha-e (warrior prints), restaging a Heian-period combat with the same dynamic triptych vocabulary that he would soon apply to modern war.