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

Yorimasa, sometimes romanized Yurimasa, is a 1893 Meiji woodblock print by Tsukioka Kogyo from his series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue). The play centers on the warrior Minamoto no Yorimasa, who at the age of seventy-five led a failed rising against the Heike and committed suicide at the Byodo-in in Uji after writing a death poem on his war fan. In noh, his ghost returns there as the shite to recount his last battle and his end. Kogyo, recognized in the Meiji art world as the foremost specialist in noh-e, shows the masked old warrior in his customary armor and robe, sometimes with the war fan that becomes the play's central prop. Working in the Meiji woodblock idiom, he relies on clean outlines, layered patterning across the armor lacings, and restrained color to capture the gravity of the character without melodrama. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, holds Kogyo's Nogaku Zue series among its strongest holdings of late nineteenth-century Japanese prints. The series functioned as a kind of illustrated guide to the noh repertoire at a moment when noh itself was being reformed and rebuilt after the Meiji Restoration, and Yorimasa's identity as a tragic warrior-poet makes the sheet emblematic of the project as a whole. For collectors, this is a strong example of how Kogyo gives a single masked figure the weight of an entire historical narrative.