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

This woodblock print (nishiki-e) in the collection of the Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (accession number 201-2844) is the third sheet of Utagawa Yoshikatsu's triptych of Lord Yoritomo's hunting party at the foot of Mount Fuji, circa 1843-1847. The left-sheet panel completes the composition with the lower reaches of the hunting ground, where mounted archers and beaters drive deer, foxes, and other game across the plain below Mount Fuji. Triptych compositions of the Yoritomo hunt were a staple of Edo musha-e production from the 1830s onward and offered designers an opportunity to combine the action of a single dramatic episode — Nitta Tadatsune's boar feat — with the panoramic landscape and crowded figural arrangement of a large-scale historical scene. Yoshikatsu's composition is signed and bears the censor's seal of the late Tenpō or early Kōka period, indicating production in the years immediately after the 1842 reforms had reshaped the Edo print market in favour of historical and moralizing subjects. The dense palette and energetic figural drawing place the print firmly within the Utagawa Kuniyoshi school tradition in which Yoshikatsu had trained. The sheet is preserved in the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University, whose holdings of mid-nineteenth-century Edo prints are among the largest in Japan, and is accessible through the museum's online image database.