• Yoshitsune's ship attacked by ghosts of the Taira warriors at Daimotsu Bay - 大物浦平家の亡霊
Yoshitsune's ship attacked by ghosts of the Taira warriors at Daimotsu Bay - 大物浦平家の亡霊
Yoshitsune's ship attacked by ghosts of the Taira warriors at Daimotsu Bay - 大物浦平家の亡霊

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) (artist 01/01/1797 – 04/14/1861)

Yoshitsune's ship attacked by ghosts of the Taira warriors at Daimotsu Bay - 大物浦平家の亡霊

Print


ca 1851
28.5 in x 14 in (Overall dimensions) color woodblock print; oban triptych
Signed: Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga
一勇斎国芳画
Artist's seal: kiri
Publisher: Enshūya Hikobei (Marks 055 - seal 21-016)
Censors' seals: Fuku and Muramatsu
British Museum
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Google map - Osaka Bay - Daimotsu is right off of Amagasaki
Lyon Collection - Kuniyoshi triptych with Kamei Rokurō fighting a bear
Nelson Art Galley - right hand panel only
Nelson Art Galley - left hand panel only
Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Köln
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College The Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Köln gives a listing of the crew of the ship:

"1. 鎌田盛政 Kamada Morimasa // 2. 武蔵坊弁慶 Musashibō Benkei // 3. 源八弘*// 4. 堀弥太郎 Hori Yatarō // 5. 赤井十郎 Akai Jūrō // 6. 熊井太郎 Kumai Tarō // 7. 伊世三郎 Ise Saburō // 8. 駿河次郎 Suruga Jirō// 9. 片岡八郎 Kataoka Hachirō // 10. 黒井五郎 Kuroi Gorō // 11. 源九郎義經 Minamoto Kurō Yoshitsune // 12. 常陸坊海尊 Hitachibō Kaison // 13. 御厩喜三太 Mimaya Kisanda // 14. 鈴木三郎重家 Suzuki Saburō Shigeie // 15. 佐藤四郎忠信 Satō Shirō Tadanobu // 16. 鷲尾(義)久 Washio Yoshihisa // 17. 増尾十郎 Masuo Jūrō // 18. 江田源三 Eda Genzō // 19. 亀井六郎 Kamei Rokurō Yoshitunes 19 Gefolgsmänner/ 義経十九臣 Yoshitsune no jūku-shin "

The curatorial notes about this composition say in translation to English from German:

"On April 25, 1185, the historically recorded naval battle between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan took place. In Shimonoseki Bay, Minamoto no Yoshitsune managed to crush the Taira clan. But in the winter of the same year, Yoshitsune had to flee from his brother. On the way to exile, his ship was caught in a severe storm - the spirits of the dead warriors of the Taira had come to take vengeance. In his picture, the woodcut artist Kuniyoshi shows the moment when the ship falls helplessly into a trough, while the next threatening wave is already being piled up by the angry spirits. The warriors of Minamoto stare in horror at the raging sea and at the spirits of the dead, for they know that their weapons are useless against the dead. Only the prayers of the monk Musahibô Benkei on the upper left at the stern of the ship can save them now, if he succeeds in summoning and driving away the spirits. The belief in spirits of the dead is still widespread in Japan today. Through the influence of beliefs from Buddhism, folk religion and ancestor worship, the idea developed that people can become ghosts after death. These spirits live in an intermediate world before entering the realm of the dead and becoming ancestral spirits. They reach this world from this intermediate world when they are guided by strong feelings such as love or hate, revenge or jealousy. It is always the oppressed and the victims who become ghosts after they die. Since the spirits of the dead are bound to this world by their unsatisfied desires and unsatisfied feelings, haunt the place or the cause of their suffering. Back to the picture: The spirits of the warriors of Taira can only be redeemed by the monk's prayers - or by the death of Minamoto. But the ominous scene will end well, the monk's prayers to Kannon, the boddhisattva of mercy and tutelary deity of seafarers, will be answered. The storm will subside and the ghosts will go away. Yoshitsune's ship will continue sailing unhindered."

****

Daimotsu Bay is in the northeast part of Osaka Bay right off the area of Amagasaki. To see this location click on the Google map link above.

During the twelfth century, the Minamoto and Taira clans waged decades of battles that are the themes of countless stories and pictures. In the decisive sea battle at Dannoura in 1185, the brilliant and charismatic commander Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–1189) routs the Taira. Kuniyoshi’s triptych draws from the nō play Benkei in a Boat (Funa Benkei), in which the returning victors are besieged in high seas by the ghosts of the defeated Taira, shown here as ghoulish silhouettes in the sky. Knowing that it is fruitless to fight spirits, Yoshitsune’s lieutenant, the warrior-monk Benkei, quells them by praying, and they melt into the sea.

"Kuniyoshi designed four triptychs on this subject each for a different publisher... In formal terms this is the most mature: the ship, great wave and their collision are all powerfully three-dimensional, with broadly swiped Prussian blue and mica lines in the waves. In contrast the forms of the ghosts appear wraithlike, made all the more uncanny by sombre colours and subtle wiping. This [the example in the British Museum] is an early printing: most of the ghosts' eyes were filled in progressively in later versions, and finally their horns were cut off... The reason for these changes is unknown."

Quoted from: Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection by Timothy Clark, pp.90-91.

There are other copies of this triptych in the Ukiyo-e Ōta Memorial Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Art.

****

The first figure, tangled up in the sail in the center panel, is Kamei Rokurō (亀井六郎), the hero of another Kuniyoshi triptych in the Lyon Collection. (See #228.)

****

Also illustrated:

1. in color in Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings - 1680-1860 edited by Julia Meech and Jane Oliver, p. 216, 2008.

2. The Raymond A. Bidwell Collection of Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1798-1861, Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts.

3. Ukiyo-e dai musha-e ten - 浮世絵大武者絵展 - (The Samurai World in Ukiyo-e), edited by Yuriko Iwakiri, Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, 2003, #194, p. 70.

4. In black and white in Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Springfield Museum of Art, 1980, #185.

5. In two variant printings in 歌川国芳展: 生誕200年記念 Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Exhibition to Commemorate the 200th Anniversary of his birth, 1996, #s70 and 71, p. 73.

6. Spanning the top of two pages in color in Kuniyoshi 国芳 by Jūzō Suzuki (鈴木重三), Heibonsha Limited, Publishers, 1992, no. 71.

7. In color in Chimi moryō no sekai : Ukiyoe : Edo no gekiga--reikai, makai no shujinkō-tachi (浮世絵魑魅魍魎の世界: 江戶の劇画 : 霊界魔界の主人公たち) by 中右瑛 (Nakau Ei), Ribun Shuppan, Tokyo, 1987, pp. 30-31. [The text is entirely in Japanese.]

8. In black and white in Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Catalogue of the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection by Roger Keyes, 1984, p. 99.[This records a copy of this triptych in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.]

9. In color over two pages in color in 浮世絵八華 (Ukiyo-e hakka), vol. 7 (Kuniyoshi), Heibonsha, 1985, #24.

10. In a small black and white reproduction in 浮世絵八華 (Ukiyo-e hakka), vol. 8 (Hiroshige), Heibonsha, 1984, p. 70.

11. In color in Kuniyoshi: Japanese master of imagined worlds by Iwakiri Yuriko with Amy Reigle Newland, Hotei Publishing, 2013, p. 61, pl. 35. Iwakiri and Newland tell us that "Book 4 of the fourteenth-century warrior tale, Gikei (Chronicles of Yoshitsune), describes how Yoshitsune's boat at sea off Harima province is attacked by Taira ghosts that appear in a black cloud and Benkei shoots an arrow of white bird feathers to disperse the spectres. Kuniyoshi's image remains close to the narrative in the Giheiki, in which the retainers in the boat lower the sails with great urgency. It is also possible that the shape of the ship here references the design 'The origins of the Tagae Buddhist prayer' (Tagae nenbutsu no yurai) from book 5 of the 1838 publication Itsukushima zue (Illustrations of Itsukushima). Kuniyoshi's visualisation is exceptional, the fantastic composition perhaps unparalleled.

The forms (including the horns) of the ghosts have been altered in the second edition. The third edition is identified by the printing of the dark green in the main areas of the sea and by the clear change in the use of tonal gradation (bokashi) and the colour blocks."

12. "Hokusai's Great Waves in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Culture" by Christine M. E. Guth, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, no. 4, December, 2011, p. 483, fig. 19.

Guth wrote about this triptych and a similar Yoshitoshi print on page 481:
An evocative nocturnal scene of the monk Benkei standing at the prow of a ship in a print from 1886 by Kuniyoshi's follower Tsukioka Yoshitoshi suggests the enduring symbolic power of this dual vision of the wave as both a cause of fear and an opportunity to demonstrate the bravery required to transcend its threat (Fig. 18). Yoshitoshi's design recalls a mythic moment in the twelfth-century battle of Dannoura between the rival forces of the Taira and Minamoto, in which Minamoto no Yoshitsune's faithful retainer Benkei saves their ship by his prayers to Kannon when great waves are summoned up from the depths of the sea by the vengeful spirit of Taira no Tomomori. Earlier, Kuniyoshi had brought out many interpretations of this epic battle, often in the form of panoramic triptychs. In one published about 1851, the wave is a huge mound that towers above the ship, and the scene.
13. In black and white in Ukiyo-e Masterpieces in European Collections: British Museum III, supervised by Muneshige Narazaki, Kodansha Ltd, 1988, #30, p. 173.

14. In color in Ukiyo-e from The Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA, 1994, #24, page 93.

15. In color in Japanese Yōkai and Other Supernatural Beings: Authentic Paintings and Prints of 100 Ghosts, Demons, Monsters and Magicians by Andreas Marks, Tuttle Publishing, 2023, p. 227.
warrior prints (musha-e - 武者絵) (genre)
Enshūya Hikobei (遠州屋彦兵衛) (publisher)
Yūrei-zu (幽霊図 - ghosts demons monsters and spirits) (genre)
Musashibō Benkei (武蔵坊弁慶) (role)
Minamoto no Yoshitsune (源義経) (role)
Taira no Tomomori (平知盛: 1151 to 4/25/1185) (role)