No. 3: Kato Kiyomasa, from the series "Three Tales of Valor (Buyu sanban tsuzuki)"

Dated 1820 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1954.718), this Katsukawa Shuntei [shikishiban](/glossary/shikishiban) [surimono](/glossary/surimono) is the third print in the series Three Tales of Valor (Buyu sanban tsuzuki). The subject is Katō Kiyomasa (1562–1611), one of the most celebrated warrior figures of the late sixteenth-century Sengoku period and Edo-period popular imagination. Kiyomasa was a leading general under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, played a prominent role in the Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597, and later became the first Tokugawa-period daimyō of Higo Province. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries his historical figure had been fully absorbed into Edo popular culture as a quintessential exemplar of samurai valor — celebrated in kabuki plays, illustrated histories, and warrior prints — and his appearance in a surimono series titled Three Tales of Valor reflects this canonical status. The shikishiban surimono format used here was the standard for privately commissioned poetry-club prints of the Bunka and Bunsei eras: small (roughly 20 cm square), executed with maximum technical refinement, and distributed to members of literary networks rather than sold through commercial publishing channels. Shuntei's design participates in the late-Edo tradition of warrior surimono in which heroic historical figures supplied subject matter for poetry-club commemoration. The series belongs to Shuntei's late period: he died in 1820, the same year this print is dated, and works from his final years carry particular interest as the conclusion of a career that had developed warrior imagery as its central concern.