Chosakabé Nobuchika and Sengoku Gonbei, from the series Newly Selected Records of the Taikō Hideyoshi (Shinsen Taikōki)

This 1883 print by Utagawa Toyonobu, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession sc186224, object 254992), depicts the confrontation between Chōsokabe Nobuchika and Sengoku Gonbei (Hisahide) within the Shinsen Taikōki (Newly Selected Records of the Taikō Hideyoshi). The Chōsokabe Nobuchika encounter belongs to the broader narrative of Hideyoshi's continental campaigns: Sengoku Gonbei was a Toyotomi general whose disastrous leadership at the 1587 Battle of Hetsugigawa during the Kyūshū campaign resulted in the death of Nobuchika, son of the Chōsokabe clan head, an episode that became a famous example of military failure in late-Edo and Meiji popular historiography. Toyonobu's composition treats the meeting as a two-figure confrontation with the antagonists tightly framed in the dramatic moment, and the bright aniline reds and purples place the print within the Meiji color register. The Shinsen Taikōki used such specific historical encounters as discrete narrative units to assemble a panoramic biography of Hideyoshi and his generals.