Warrior Kajiwara Kagesue (variant 3)

Warrior Kajiwara Kagesue, a further variant from the Hasegawa workshop, is an undated Taishō or early Shōwa print by Hasegawa Sadanobu III (1881-1963), recorded on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/wbp/835718988). The subject is Kajiwara Genta Kagesue, the Genpei-period warrior of the Tale of the Heike who races Sasaki Takatsuna across the Uji River in 1184 in advance of the Ichinotani campaign — one of the canonical bravado episodes of medieval Japanese narrative and a staple of the kabuki and bunraku Genpei battle repertoire. As third head of the Hasegawa Osaka-Kyoto ukiyo-e house, Sadanobu III sustained a Kansai late-ukiyo-e [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e) tradition in which paired Sasaki and Kajiwara prints — usually issued as companion sheets, sometimes as parts of small sets — were a recurring product. This variant carries the same basic iconography as the workshop's other Kajiwara designs: single armored figure isolated against a plain ground, helmet and pose marking the warrior as the Uji River figure rather than a generic samurai. The repeated reissuing and re-cutting of the design (multiple variants survive in the ukiyo-e.org records, including the present impression and the companion under wbp/796941526) reflects the workshop's standard practice of keeping a small core repertoire in active circulation across the Taishō and early Shōwa years, satisfying both Kansai connoisseur demand and foreign collectors who increasingly sought clean late-Hasegawa impressions in the interwar period. The ukiyo-e.org record carries the sheet as a Sadanobu III print without further museum context, but the iconography and the workshop pattern together locate it firmly within the Hasegawa Kansai musha-e idiom.