Captain Matsuzaki Bravely Fights at the Great Battle of Songhwan (Seikan no Gekissen, Matsuzaki Taii funyu no zu)
- Date:
- 1894
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; oban triptych
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Captain Matsuzaki Bravely Fights at the Great Battle of Songhwan, dated 1894 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, commemorates one of the named Japanese officer-heroes of the early Sino-Japanese War campaign in Korea. Captain Matsuzaki Naoomi was killed at Songhwan in July 1894, and his death became one of the first widely publicised individual losses of the conflict, generating a small subgenre of Meiji prints in which his final actions were dramatised. Migita Toshihide's contribution, registered with the Art Institute and aligned with his broader Sino-Japanese War output, places Matsuzaki at the centre of the design, sword raised, with both fallen and advancing figures around him. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had been trained to compose around a single named protagonist within a larger melee, and senso-e of this kind sat squarely within that inherited grammar. The Art Institute's holdings of Toshihide's war prints form one of the most accessible collections of his 1894-1895 work outside Japan, and Captain Matsuzaki's sheet is among the most historically specific within that collection because it ties to a verifiable battlefield event and a named, decorated officer. The print's combination of biographical commemoration and immediate news value is characteristic of senso-e at the start of the war, and the design demonstrates Toshihide working at the height of his battle-print powers.
Captain Matsuzaki Bravely Fights at the Great Battle of Songhwan (Seikan no Gekissen, Matsuzaki Taii funyu no zu) was created by Migita Toshihide (右田年英) in 1894.
