Seven Brilliant Heroes (Komei shichi yosei)
Komei shichi yosei
About This Series
"Seven Brilliant Heroes" (Komei shichi yosei) is a small mid-career Yoshitoshi musha-e series presenting seven celebrated warriors and martial figures of Japanese history as a numbered set of full-length single-figure portraits. The series follows a conventional ukiyo-e format in which a small, fixed number of heroes from the historical canon are gathered under a unifying title; Kuniyoshi had produced multiple sets of this type, and Yoshitoshi inherited the convention and adapted it to his own more carefully characterized portraiture. Komei shichi yosei is generally dated to the 1860s or early 1870s, placing it in the productive middle period of Yoshitoshi's career between his early apprentice work under Kuniyoshi and the great late masterpieces of the 1880s; the seven figures are selected from the standard pool of military heroes that populated the musha-e tradition, including warriors from the Genpei wars and the Sengoku period. The prints are issued in oban tate-e format, with each sheet bearing a cartouche identifying the warrior by name and giving a brief biographical inscription. The series is notable for its careful armour rendering and its restrained handling of background, qualities that would become hallmarks of Yoshitoshi's later musha-e style and that distinguish his work from the more crowded battle compositions of the late Edo period. Impressions are uncommon in Western collections and the series has received less catalogue attention than the better-known late projects, but examples are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and in major Japanese collections including the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the series figures in Stevenson's listings of Yoshitoshi's mid-career heroic projects.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
"Seven Brilliant Heroes" (Komei shichi yosei) is a small mid-career Yoshitoshi musha-e series presenting seven celebrated warriors and martial figures of Japanese history as a numbered set of full-length single-figure portraits. The series follows a conventional ukiyo-e format in which a small, fixed number of heroes from the historical canon are gathered under a unifying title; Kuniyoshi had produced multiple sets of this type, and Yoshitoshi inherited the convention and adapted it to his own more carefully characterized portraiture. Komei shichi yosei is generally dated to the 1860s or early 1870s, placing it in the productive middle period of Yoshitoshi's career between his early apprentice work under Kuniyoshi and the great late masterpieces of the 1880s; the seven figures are selected from the standard pool of military heroes that populated the musha-e tradition, including warriors from the Genpei wars and the Sengoku period. The prints are issued in oban tate-e format, with each sheet bearing a cartouche identifying the warrior by name and giving a brief biographical inscription. The series is notable for its careful armour rendering and its restrained handling of background, qualities that would become hallmarks of Yoshitoshi's later musha-e style and that distinguish his work from the more crowded battle compositions of the late Edo period. Impressions are uncommon in Western collections and the series has received less catalogue attention than the better-known late projects, but examples are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and in major Japanese collections including the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the series figures in Stevenson's listings of Yoshitoshi's mid-career heroic projects.
The Seven Brilliant Heroes (Komei shichi yosei) series contains 1 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
The Seven Brilliant Heroes (Komei shichi yosei) series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Seven Brilliant Heroes (Komei shichi yosei) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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