Lord Yoritomo's Hunt at Mount Fuji (center sheet)

This woodblock print (nishiki-e) in the collection of the Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (accession number 201-2843) is a second sheet from Utagawa Yoshikatsu's triptych of Lord Yoritomo's hunting party at the foot of Mount Fuji, circa 1843-1847. As the centre sheet of the three-part composition, it positions the snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji across the upper background, with the shogun Minamoto Yoritomo seated in formal kimono on a high vantage point and his retainers and the hunt's beaters arranged in the valley below. The Yoritomo hunt cycle was one of the foundational subjects of Edo warrior literature and theatre, dramatizing the consolidation of Kamakura shogunal authority over the eastern provinces in the late twelfth century, and Edo woodblock publishers regularly commissioned triptych and pentaptych compositions on the subject to satisfy the dense market for musha-e (warrior prints). Yoshikatsu's treatment, executed in the Kuniyoshi-school manner, deploys the saturated palette and crowded figural arrangement that characterize late Tenpō and Kōka warrior triptychs and reflects the cultural ascendancy of musha-e in the period immediately following the Tenpō Reforms of 1842, which had suppressed yakusha-e and bijin-ga and forced Edo print publishers to reorient their output toward historical and moral subjects. The sheet, in standard ōban format, is preserved in the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum's collection of nineteenth-century Japanese prints.