Tadanori, from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Tadanori, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for his series Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts the ghost of the Heike warrior-poet Taira no Tadanori, who was killed at the battle of Ichi-no-Tani in 1184 with a poem about cherry blossoms tucked into his quiver. The Noh play built around his story belongs to the warrior-ghost category, in which a dead samurai returns to a traveling priest to plead for prayers and for the recognition of his verse in the imperial anthology that his side's defeat had denied him. Kōgyo captures the figure mid-gesture, the warrior costume articulated through layered armor, brocade, and the long sleeves that Noh choreography turns into instruments of meaning. As one of the leading designers of Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) to specialize in Noh prints, Kōgyo treats the subject with documentary precision; the mask, the staging, and the actor's pose are recognizable to anyone who has watched the play, and the series as a whole was studied by Noh schools as a visual record. Born in 1869 and trained successively under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō, Kōgyo devoted his career almost exclusively to this single subject, eventually producing the much larger compendium Nōga Taikan in the early twentieth century. Nōgaku Zue marks the early flowering of that project, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds this Tadanori sheet among the impressions that document how late Meiji print designers used the woodblock medium to preserve and elevate a classical Japanese performing art at risk of marginalization.