Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan
About This Series
Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan is the title under which a group of Mori Yoshitoshi (1898-1992) warrior portraits has been gathered, the artist's kappazuri stencil treatments of heroic figures from Japanese military and legendary history given a collective heading in the manner of the Edo-period kagami or mirror anthologies that ranked and depicted famous generals across the historical record. Mori, originally trained in textile design and katagami stencil cutting in the kimono dyer's workshop tradition, developed in the postwar decades a distinctive stencil-printmaking idiom in which broad areas of mineral pigment are brushed through a persimmon-tannin-stiffened cut-paper stencil onto sized washi, with a separate contour stencil providing the bold black line, producing the deliberate flatness and folk-art directness that distinguish his sheets from contemporary mokuhanga practice. The warrior subjects allowed him to recast the iconography of the ukiyo-e bushe and the kabuki aragoto heroic role in the vocabulary of mingei folk art, with figures such as Benkei, Yoshitsune, Saito Musashi-bo, and the great commanders of the Heian, Sengoku, and Edo periods rendered in heavily contoured masks, exaggerated armor, and assertive poses. The series belongs to the postwar mingei revival around the Japan Folk Crafts Museum and Yanagi Soetsu's promotion of the unknown craftsman, and Mori's collaboration with the stencil dyer Serizawa Keisuke shaped both his technical procedure and the framing of his work within the folk-crafts intellectual world. Impressions of the Mirror of Famous Generals subjects are documented in the Tokyo National Museum, the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print and folk art.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan is the title under which a group of Mori Yoshitoshi (1898-1992) warrior portraits has been gathered, the artist's kappazuri stencil treatments of heroic figures from Japanese military and legendary history given a collective heading in the manner of the Edo-period kagami or mirror anthologies that ranked and depicted famous generals across the historical record. Mori, originally trained in textile design and katagami stencil cutting in the kimono dyer's workshop tradition, developed in the postwar decades a distinctive stencil-printmaking idiom in which broad areas of mineral pigment are brushed through a persimmon-tannin-stiffened cut-paper stencil onto sized washi, with a separate contour stencil providing the bold black line, producing the deliberate flatness and folk-art directness that distinguish his sheets from contemporary mokuhanga practice. The warrior subjects allowed him to recast the iconography of the ukiyo-e bushe and the kabuki aragoto heroic role in the vocabulary of mingei folk art, with figures such as Benkei, Yoshitsune, Saito Musashi-bo, and the great commanders of the Heian, Sengoku, and Edo periods rendered in heavily contoured masks, exaggerated armor, and assertive poses. The series belongs to the postwar mingei revival around the Japan Folk Crafts Museum and Yanagi Soetsu's promotion of the unknown craftsman, and Mori's collaboration with the stencil dyer Serizawa Keisuke shaped both his technical procedure and the framing of his work within the folk-crafts intellectual world. Impressions of the Mirror of Famous Generals subjects are documented in the Tokyo National Museum, the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print and folk art.
The Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan series contains 1 prints, created by Yoshitoshi Mori.
The Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan series was created by Yoshitoshi Mori (森義利).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan?
Sign up to start rating