Battle of Okehazama in Bishū, Owari Province (Bishū Okehazama kassen)

This 1883 musha-e by Utagawa Toyonobu, held by the Harvard Art Museums (accession HUAM-INV017331), is one of the individual sheets in his Bishū Okehazama kassen series depicting the 1560 Battle of Okehazama. The series, of which Harvard holds multiple sheets dated December 1882 and 1883, treated Oda Nobunaga's surprise attack on the Imagawa army as a panoramic narrative across multiple compositions, with each sheet picking out a moment of the battle, a confrontation between specific commanders, or a phase of the engagement. The Okehazama narrative was a touchstone for Meiji popular history because Nobunaga's victory founded the chain of events that led to the unification of Japan under Hideyoshi and the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Toyonobu's composition uses the bright aniline reds of the Meiji color register and the dense cavalry-and-infantry crowd scene that defined warrior-print conventions of the early 1880s, with figures drawn in the Utagawa-school style inherited from his teacher Toyohara Kunichika and from the Kunisada lineage of the late Edo period.