Vintage print of Utagawa Kuniyoshi's "Warrior" ("The Death of Jirou"). The work is an illustration to the tale “The Nineteen Vassals of Yoshitsune”, the original was published in 1840. The lithography presented on the site was created in the 1980s. The lithograph bears the signature of the head of the printing workshop. Seal. Japan, 1980.

Among other cycles of historical and heroic themes, Kuniyoshi also created the illustrated story “Yoshitsune’s Nineteen Vassals.” As one of the famous masters of woodcuts of the time, the artist had a large school in which numerous students studied. According to the traditions of the Utagawa school, they signed works with a characteristic frame of the hieroglyph, as can be seen from their inscriptions on individual sheets of the series. Before us is a classic version of an illustration of the life of Yoshitsune Minamoto - a legendary hero in whom centuries-old folk ideas about courage, nobility and masculinity are intertwined; a story presented not as a series of portraits of characters or with extensive literary passages to complement the image, but as a scroll of images. On individual images, the names of the characters are written in small frames: Musashino Bobenkei, Saburo, Kumai Taro, Aneva Heiji, Umino Taro, Oumi Jubei and others. Closer to the first and last pages, in the tradition of Heian aesthetics, the calligraphic inscription participates as an equal element in the pictorial order of the engraving. Around it you can see a phonetic key, as well as a reading of hieroglyphs, revealing the semantics of words in the overall figurative structure of the work.

The series for the tale “The Nineteen Vassals of Yoshitsune” was probably created around 1837 to 1840, before the yakusha-e (actor engraving) and bijinga (female beauty) genres were banned in 1842. The engraving was created using a color printing method using a maximum of 7 plates, and its composition was entirely constructed using artistic techniques from the Utagawa school.