Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重, 1797–1858)

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

A fine, full-coloured impression with a crisp keyblock throughout, from the calligraphy of the text panel to the patterns of the mother's robe. The deep evening blue of the sky is rich and even, with the wood grain of the block visible, and it carries the flight of geese across the upper half of the sheet. The colours most prone to fading on this design have all survived: the pink of the veranda, the mauve cloud behind the text, and the purple of the boys' kimono. The greens of the mother's robe and the grass, and the blue of the stream and the boys' sashes, are fresh.

Paper

Untrimmed full sheet with wide margins on all four sides. Light, even toning of the margins consistent with age. Minor handling marks and light soiling along the sheet edges, slightly worn corners, and a few small creases in the margins. The image area is clean. No tears or losses visible.

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully — they form part of this condition description. We are happy to send additional close-ups on request.

The Scene — Five Geese in an Autumn Sky

The text panel by Ryūkatei Tanekazu tells the episode. After her husband's murder, Kawazu's widow took her two young sons and married Soga Tarō Sukenobu. One mid-autumn evening, as a line of wild geese crossed the sky, the elder boy Ichimanmaru pointed and said: of those five geese, two must be the father and mother, and the other three their children — yet we have a mother and no father. His younger brother Hakoōmaru, puzzled, asked whether Lord Sukenobu was not their father. Ichimanmaru answered that Sukenobu was their father only by obligation; their true father was Lord Kawazu. Remembering how their father had died, he wept, and Hakoōmaru wet his small sleeves with tears too. From that day the two set their hearts together on revenge.

Hiroshige stages the episode as a quiet domestic scene. Ichimanmaru stands pointing at the sky; Hakoōmaru sits on a rock, shading his eyes to follow the birds. Their mother, labelled 兄弟の母, leans from the veranda above them, watching her sons. Count the birds against the deep blue sky: there are five, exactly as in the text. It is a gentle picture of an origin moment — the childhood promise that leads, years later, to the vendetta.

The Soga Revenge — Where It Began

The Soga monogatari grew out of a real vendetta of the early Kamakura period. In 1176 the warrior Kawazu Saburō Sukeyasu was shot dead in an ambush arranged by his kinsman Kudō Suketsune over a disputed inheritance. He left two small sons, Ichimanmaru and Hakoōmaru, who grew up in the Soga household after their mother's remarriage.

The boys later came of age as Soga Jūrō Sukenari and Soga Gorō Tokimune. In 1193, during Minamoto no Yoritomo's great hunt at the foot of Mount Fuji, they broke into Suketsune's quarters at night in a rainstorm and killed him. Jūrō died in the fighting that followed; Gorō was captured and executed.

In the Edo period the story became one of the most retold in Japanese culture. Soga plays opened the kabuki season in Edo every New Year, and the brothers were seen as models of filial loyalty. The wild-geese episode shown here is the emotional root of the whole tale: the moment the vendetta begins, not with a sword but with two children looking at the sky.

The Series — A Landscape Master Tells a Story

The Soga monogatari zue retells the Soga tale in a sequence of upright ōban sheets, issued around 1845–46 by Ibaya Senzaburō, with narrative texts by the popular fiction writer Ryūkatei Tanekazu. The series was later reissued under the publisher Yorozuya Kichibei. It belongs to the years after the Tenpō reforms of 1842, when prints of actors and courtesans were restricted and historical and moral subjects offered publishers a safe field.

Hiroshige was by then famous for landscape, and this series is a departure. What makes it distinctive is how much of each sheet he gives to setting. Here the evening sky fills half the composition, and the story's key image — geese in flight — is a motif familiar from his landscape and bird-and-flower prints, such as the descending geese at Katata in his Eight Views of Ōmi. The narrative turns on a subject that was already one of his strengths.

Utagawa Hiroshige — Beyond the Tōkaidō

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) is, with Hokusai, the most celebrated landscape artist of the ukiyo-e tradition. Born into a family of fire wardens in Edo, he trained under Utagawa Toyohiro and rose to fame in the early 1830s with The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. His late series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was studied and copied by Van Gogh and Whistler.

Hiroshige also produced warrior, historical and narrative prints throughout his career, and these are far less familiar to Western collectors. The Soga monogatari zue shows the two sides of his work together: a dramatic subject from the warrior tradition, handled with the atmospheric sense of place that defines his landscapes.

Collector's Note

Sheets from this series appear on the market far less often than Hiroshige's landscape series, and many that do are trimmed, faded, or later issues. This sheet carries the Ibaya publisher's mark of the original issue and measures 38.5 × 25.5 cm. For comparison, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston records its Ibaya impression of this design at 35.3 × 24.1 cm.