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• 1 media/2015.13.4.jpg 2020-01-12T15:24:27-08:00 Moon at the Yamaki Mansion 25 plain 955748 2020-03-02T14:54:23-08:00 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi is known as the last master of Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), a genre of Japanese woodblock printing and painting which flourished in the Edo period (1603-1867). Following the Meiji Restoration, which began in 1868 and ushered in the adoption of Western mass reproduction methods such as photography and lithography, the Ukiyo-e genre had declined. Even while experiencing these changes to traditional Japanese culture, Yoshitoshi tried to preserve the classic tradition of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Although Yoshitoshi is famous for his “Bloody Prints” which concentrated on violence and eerie representations of death, he returned to the less intense themes of Japanese and Chinese folklore in his later career. This print, produced in his last years, illustrates the historic Minamoto (源氏) clan’s declaration of war against the Taira clan (平氏) in 1180, when they sent an assassin to kill Kanetaka of Taira (平兼隆). Yoshitoshi depicted the tense moment when Kanetaka’s looming silhouette appears, revealed against beams of moonlight, when the assassin attempts to trick him by thrusting his saber toward his helmet. As Kanetaka tries to slash the oncoming helmet, the assassin attacks him from the opposite side. This tense moment is further enhanced by the assassin’s strained posture, as he attempts to escape the attack, and the thrusted helmet that tumbles out of the frame right before the blow.
  
  To learn more about the artist Yoshitoshi, visit the website associated with the exhibition Yoshitoshi: Spirit and Spectacle, held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2019.