Parody of the Story of Yoritomo Releasing Cranes at Yuigahama

Parody of the Story of Yoritomo Releasing Cranes at Yuigahama is a color woodblock print by Kitagawa Hidemaro of 1806, held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (object number 502236). The print recasts a canonical Kamakura-period narrative — the release of cranes by Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), the founder of the Kamakura shogunate, at the Yuigahama beach in 1187 — as a contemporary Yoshiwara scene populated by courtesans in Hidemaro's characteristic Kitagawa-school manner. The Yoritomo crane-release legend, drawn from the medieval war chronicles, was a familiar subject of Edo painting and print; converting it into a Yoshiwara mitate (parody) was the standard intellectualized strategy by which late-Utamaro school designers gave their bijin-ga the cultural prestige of classical historical reference. The 1806 date — the year of Utamaro's death — places the print at a pivotal moment in the Kitagawa school's transition, and Hidemaro's continuation of the mitate mode here documents the persistence of his teacher's compositional vocabulary into the post-Utamaro decade. The print's literary substrate and the contemporary Yoshiwara setting it adopts are typical of Hidemaro's mature bijin-ga work, and the impression is one of the better-documented dated prints in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's late-Kitagawa school holdings.