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

This woodblock print (nishiki-e) in the collection of the Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (accession number 201-2842) is one sheet of Utagawa Yoshikatsu's triptych depicting Lord Yoritomo's hunting party at the foot of Mount Fuji (頼朝公冨士之御狩図, Yoritomo-kō Fuji no o-kari no zu), one of the most familiar warrior-narrative subjects in the Edo print tradition. The composition, dated to circa 1843-1847 in the late Tenpō and early Kōka eras, follows the iconographic conventions Yoshikatsu had inherited from his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who had established the modern visual vocabulary for the Yoritomo hunt subject in his musha-e of the 1830s. The narrative depicted is the celebrated boar-killing feat of Nitta Tadatsune, retainer of the first Kamakura shogun Minamoto Yoritomo (1147-1199), during a great hunting expedition staged in 1193 at the foot of Mount Fuji. According to the medieval narratives recorded in the Soga monogatari and Azuma kagami, an enormous wild boar charged the shogun's party and Tadatsune leapt onto the animal's back to dispatch it with his sword; the feat became a stock subject of warrior literature and theatre and was a perennial favourite of Edo woodblock designers. Yoshikatsu's right-sheet panel places Tadatsune and the boar in the foreground, with the dense, energetic figural drawing and saturated mineral palette of saffron yellows, indigo blues, and bright reds that characterize Kuniyoshi-school musha-e of the period. The sheet measures approximately 37.5 by 24.8 cm, the standard ōban format of mid-nineteenth-century Edo prints. It is preserved in the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum's extensive collection of Edo and Meiji nishiki-e and is accessible through the museum's online image database.