Minamoto no Yoritomo Hiding in a Tree

A horizontal oban yoko-e benizuri-e by Torii Kiyoshige depicting an episode from the life of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the late-Heian warrior who founded the Kamakura shogunate in the late twelfth century and became the first shogun of medieval Japan. The episode shown - Yoritomo hiding in a tree to evade his pursuers during the civil war of the 1180s - was a recurring subject in medieval and Edo-period Japanese visual culture, drawn from the Heike monogatari and other military epics that supplied painters and printmakers with subjects from the late-Heian and early-Kamakura wars. The episode marks a critical moment in the Genpei war, when Yoritomo, then a hunted exile from the Taira-dominated court, evaded his pursuers and survived to organise the eastern military coalition that would defeat the Taira and establish the shogunate at Kamakura. The horizontal oban yoko-e format is unusual for Kiyoshige and for the Torii school in general, whose yakusha-e output was almost entirely on narrow vertical sheets; the wider horizontal composition allowed the artist to develop a landscape setting around the figure of the hidden warrior. Dated to around 1758 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the print is among Kiyoshige's later signed works.