A Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals
About This Series
"A Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals" is the English title under which several modern museum catalogues record sheets from one or more of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's musha-e series devoted to celebrated military commanders from across the span of Japanese history. The most likely source for prints recorded under this title is Yoshitoshi's Dai Nihon meisho kagami of the later 1870s and 1880s, his principal Meiji-period cycle of single-figure general portraits, though English-language cataloguing of Yoshitoshi musha-e is inconsistent and the title may also embrace sheets from related projects such as the Nihon meisho kyokakuden of his earlier career. Whatever the precise series of origin, the prints in this group exemplify the late-nineteenth-century ukiyo-e treatment of the national military canon, depicting individual commanders in full armour against a minimal background, with cartouches giving the warrior's name and a brief biographical or anecdotal text drawn from the popular historiography of the early Meiji state. Yoshitoshi's contribution to the genre, inherited from his teacher Kuniyoshi but recast in the more carefully observed and pictorially restrained mode of his maturity, was central to the visual canonization of national heroes in the decades after the Restoration and provided source material for later textbook and ephemera illustration. Impressions from Yoshitoshi's general-portrait series are held throughout the major Yoshitoshi collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, and the prints are documented in John Stevenson's catalogues of Yoshitoshi's mature historical work. Sheets recorded under the "Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals" rubric are best read together with the related Dai Nihon meisho kagami corpus rather than as a discrete published series of their own.
Frequently Asked Questions
"A Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals" is the English title under which several modern museum catalogues record sheets from one or more of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's musha-e series devoted to celebrated military commanders from across the span of Japanese history. The most likely source for prints recorded under this title is Yoshitoshi's Dai Nihon meisho kagami of the later 1870s and 1880s, his principal Meiji-period cycle of single-figure general portraits, though English-language cataloguing of Yoshitoshi musha-e is inconsistent and the title may also embrace sheets from related projects such as the Nihon meisho kyokakuden of his earlier career. Whatever the precise series of origin, the prints in this group exemplify the late-nineteenth-century ukiyo-e treatment of the national military canon, depicting individual commanders in full armour against a minimal background, with cartouches giving the warrior's name and a brief biographical or anecdotal text drawn from the popular historiography of the early Meiji state. Yoshitoshi's contribution to the genre, inherited from his teacher Kuniyoshi but recast in the more carefully observed and pictorially restrained mode of his maturity, was central to the visual canonization of national heroes in the decades after the Restoration and provided source material for later textbook and ephemera illustration. Impressions from Yoshitoshi's general-portrait series are held throughout the major Yoshitoshi collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, and the prints are documented in John Stevenson's catalogues of Yoshitoshi's mature historical work. Sheets recorded under the "Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals" rubric are best read together with the related Dai Nihon meisho kagami corpus rather than as a discrete published series of their own.
The A Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals series contains 1 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
The A Mirror of Famous Japanese Generals series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).
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