Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan
About This Series
"Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan" (Dai Nihon meisho kagami, or in some catalogues Honcho meisho kagami) is one of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's principal musha-e cycles of the early Meiji period, a survey of celebrated military commanders from across the recorded history of Japan presented as a sequence of single-figure warrior portraits. The series was issued in the latter half of the 1870s and into the 1880s, in oban tate-e format, by one of the Tokyo publishers with whom Yoshitoshi was working at the time, and ran to approximately fifty sheets, though publication appears to have been intermittent and the exact number of designs catalogued varies between sources. The roster includes commanders from the ancient and medieval wars (Yamato Takeru, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige), the Sengoku-period unifiers (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu) and lesser-known regional warlords, each identified by name and biographical inscription in a cartouche. Yoshitoshi worked in the iconography of the pre-modern warrior portrait inherited from Kuniyoshi but recast it for the post-Restoration audience that was beginning to read its national history through the lens of the new Meiji historiography: the series can be understood as a visual companion to the late nineteenth-century textbooks and popular histories that constructed the canon of national heroes for the new state. The compositions are notable for the careful rendering of armour and weaponry and for the dignified, monumental presentation of each figure against a minimal background. The series is held in substantial parts in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, and is documented in John Stevenson's checklists of Yoshitoshi's mature musha-e work.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
"Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan" (Dai Nihon meisho kagami, or in some catalogues Honcho meisho kagami) is one of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's principal musha-e cycles of the early Meiji period, a survey of celebrated military commanders from across the recorded history of Japan presented as a sequence of single-figure warrior portraits. The series was issued in the latter half of the 1870s and into the 1880s, in oban tate-e format, by one of the Tokyo publishers with whom Yoshitoshi was working at the time, and ran to approximately fifty sheets, though publication appears to have been intermittent and the exact number of designs catalogued varies between sources. The roster includes commanders from the ancient and medieval wars (Yamato Takeru, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige), the Sengoku-period unifiers (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu) and lesser-known regional warlords, each identified by name and biographical inscription in a cartouche. Yoshitoshi worked in the iconography of the pre-modern warrior portrait inherited from Kuniyoshi but recast it for the post-Restoration audience that was beginning to read its national history through the lens of the new Meiji historiography: the series can be understood as a visual companion to the late nineteenth-century textbooks and popular histories that constructed the canon of national heroes for the new state. The compositions are notable for the careful rendering of armour and weaponry and for the dignified, monumental presentation of each figure against a minimal background. The series is held in substantial parts in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, and is documented in John Stevenson's checklists of Yoshitoshi's mature musha-e work.
The Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan series contains 1 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
The Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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