Warrior Yamamoto Kansuke (Yamamoto Haruyuki, 1501-1561) in Battle, from the series Eiyū ōyamato tōfushi

From Utagawa Kuniyoshi's series Eiyū ōyamato tōfushi, this print depicts the warrior Yamamoto Kansuke (Yamamoto Haruyuki, 1501–1561) in battle. Kansuke served as a strategist for the Takeda clan and died at the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima in 1561, the climactic engagement of the long contest between Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin; legend dressed him in a sequence of injuries—one-eyed, one-legged, and limping—that made him an irresistible subject for nineteenth-century ukiyo-e. Kuniyoshi's series Eiyū ōyamato tōfushi (Heroes of Great Japan in Comparative Estimates of Courage) joins the broad late-Edo recovery of Sengoku and earlier military history that the master of warrior prints did so much to popularize. The composition typical of such a sheet isolates Kansuke against a battlefield ground, magnifying his physiognomy and armor with the heavy keyblock that distinguishes Kuniyoshi's musha-e (warrior prints), and using selective vermilion and indigo to draw attention to wound, weapon, and clan crest. As Edo ukiyo-e, the print performs the dual function of popular biography and aesthetic object: it taught nineteenth-century townsmen the names of the great strategists of the sixteenth century while pushing the technical limits of the polychrome woodblock. The Harvard Art Museums hold this impression among their extensive Kuniyoshi holdings, where it stands with his many other portraits of the heroes of the Warring States period. Source: Harvard Art Museums (object 316951).