Triptych: Battle Crossing of the Sumidagawa (Sumidagawa ikada watashi no zu)

This Utagawa Kuniyoshi triptych, Battle Crossing of the Sumidagawa (Sumidagawa ikada watashi no zu), takes one of the most celebrated set pieces of medieval Japanese warfare—the crossing of a great river by an armored army—and stretches it across three ōban sheets in the wide-format mode that Kuniyoshi pioneered for his warrior prints. The composition's spine is the river itself, with the makeshift rafts (ikada) and floating planks providing a low horizontal stage on which mounted samurai, foot soldiers, and bannermen are arrayed in the densely tangled choreography characteristic of Kuniyoshi's mature battle scenes. Although the Harvard Art Museums entry records 1867, six years after Kuniyoshi's death in 1861, the date reflects a posthumous reissue of a design from his lifetime—his battle triptychs continued to be republished in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period as the demand for warrior prints intensified during the political crises of the 1860s. The print exemplifies the Edo ukiyo-e tradition's capacity for narrative complexity: armor crests identify clans, gestures encode duels, and the diagonal of the river organizes what would otherwise be a chaotic mass into a legible epic. The Harvard impression preserves the triptych intact across all three sheets, an important condition for compositions that are only fully intelligible as a single field. Source: Harvard Art Museums (object 202257).