Pre-Edo emaki of samurai warfare, ex Franklin and Lefty Lewis

[Gosannen War of the Heian Period]. Gosannen kassen emakimono [Illustrated Chronicle of the Later Three Years War in Mutsu Province].

€ 165.000,00

Pre-Tokugawa painted narrative handscroll, assessed by Dr James Ulak (Freer Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) as 16th century or earlier, making it a genuine pre-Edo survival rather than an Edo-period antiquarian re-creation. A category whose rarity beyond Japan Colin Franklin expressed with characteristic bluntness: an emaki exhibition "has never been attempted outside Japan", "primary among" the reasons being "the difficulties inherent in assembling a group of Japan’s most prized cultural treasures". Hence, he also remarked, "it would not now be possible to collect" examples "from the sixteenth century or earlier". No pre-1600 emakimono of comparable type is readily traced in published Western auction or trade records; the present scroll appears among the earliest obtainable examples in decades.

The handscroll is complete in itself and presents three chapters from volume one of the Tokyo National Museum's Gosannen kassen ekotoba sequence, arranged in eight alternating sections of painting and calligraphic narration. Its subject is the Later Three Years War (1083-87) in Mutsu Province, a foundational martial epic of the late Heian period in which Minamoto no Yoshiie emerges as the exemplary cultured man of war for later generations of samurai.

Among the set pieces is the famous moment when Yoshiie reads the sudden rising of a flock of geese as evidence of an ambush, a vignette that condenses the chronicle’s interplay of strategy, omen-reading, and battlefield violence. The imagery repeatedly returns to the slow attrition of siege warfare at Kanazawa-saku, where near-reiterated battle compositions heighten the sense of exhaustion and slaughter as the stronghold gradually falls, the pictorial vocabulary of armour, banners, and close-quarters movement accumulating with grim insistence. The handscroll format amplifies this effect: action and text advance in a continuous horizontal flow, so that scenes play out across the viewer’s movement, closer to cinematic sequence than to the fixed opening of a codex.

The paintings stand in the long wake of the monumental Gosannen kassen ekotoba of 1347 (Tokyo National Museum, Important Cultural Property), itself a pivotal witness to a still earlier lost tradition; this copy preserves, in later form, the brutal immediacy for which battle emaki were famed.

Colin Franklin reproduced and discussed this very scroll in Collecting Japanese Books and Scrolls, observing that pre-Tokugawa narrative emaki have become effectively unobtainable in private hands, and that early examples surfacing for sale are liable to be declared national treasures and barred from export. In that light, the presence of a pre-Edo battle emaki in a Western collection is exceptional; the early style of the calligraphy was remarked upon by the Japanese bookseller Sakai of Isseido, who expressed surprise that it had ever left Japan. Western collections more commonly preserve later Edo and post-Edo copies made for antiquarian appreciation; the present early, self-contained selection is therefore a striking and historically resonant survival of the emaki tradition.