Mori Yoshitoshi - Kawanakajima

The print depicts the Battle of Kawanakajima, the series of mid-sixteenth-century engagements fought on the plain between the Sai and Chikuma rivers in Shinano Province by the rival warlords Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin. The fourth battle of 1561 furnished centuries of theatrical and pictorial material — particularly the legendary single combat between Kenshin on horseback and Shingen seated on his camp stool — and Mori is working within this long musha-e tradition. The composition is rendered in his kappazuri-influenced idiom: heavy black contour, flat color planes, and pattern printed as if from cut paper stencils, in place of the multiplane perspectival battlefields of nineteenth-century Kuniyoshi-school treatments. Banners, sashimono, and helmet ornaments are flattened into emblematic shapes rather than illusionistic volumes. The signature placement integrating the artist's name into the title is consistent with Mori's sosaku-hanga practice of treating every element of the print, including text, as part of the carved block.