Portrait of Yamamoto Kansuke (One of the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen)

Portrait of Yamamoto Kansuke (山本勘助像) is part of Matsumoto Fūko's Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen series at Erin-ji, executed in ink and colour on paper between 1871 and 1873 in the first major commission of his post-Yōsai career. Yamamoto Kansuke (1493–1561) was the celebrated military strategist of Takeda Shingen, traditionally identified as the architect of the great Kai campaigns and the originator of the kakuyoku ("crane-wing") formation deployed at the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima in 1561, where he was killed leading the advance column. Fūko depicts him in mature middle age, dressed in formal armour with the distinctive horned helmet associated with Takeda commanders, the painting executed in the linear, figure-centred manner Kikuchi Yōsai had codified for historical portraiture in the Zenken kojitsu album of the 1840s and 1850s. The Erin-ji series — twenty-four such scrolls produced in a single campaign in the early 1870s — was the foundational commission of Fūko's career and remains the standard set of Meiji-era reference images for Takeda iconography; modern reproductions of the Twenty-Four Generals in textbooks, exhibition catalogues and historical-novel illustrations typically reproduce Fūko's portraits. The painting is held by Erin-ji Temple in Kōshū-shi, Yamanashi Prefecture, where the original twenty-four scrolls are conserved alongside the Takeda Shingen Museum's broader holdings of Sengoku military material.