Yoritomo in a Cave (Important Cultural Property) was submitted to the 16th Revived Japan Art Institute Exhibition and it is one of Maeda Seison’s signature works. In Jisho 4 (1180), Minamoto no Yoritomo raised an army in Izu to vanquish the Taira clan, but he was roundly defeated at the Battle of Mount Ishibashi. Pursued by enemies, he hid in a cave near Fushiki in the Hakone mountains. As the pursuers drew closer, Yoritomo prepared to make a last stand. As luck would have it, though, he managed to escape to Manazuru and from there he built a new army that would eventually beat the Taira. So in a sense, the painting depicts a pivotal scene in Japanese history. Yoritomo is shown huddling in the cave with Dohi Sanehira, Sanehira’s son Yataro Tohira, Shinkai Arajiro Tada’uji, Tsuchiya Saburo Muneto, Okazaki Shiro Yoshizane, and Adachi Tokuro Morinaga. A sense of tension radiates from the huge screen, more than three tatami mats in size, with Seison imbuing the work with an overwhelming intensity. The “Haya-uma” (The Courier) chapter of the 5th scroll of The Tale of the Heike describes how “Dohi Sanehira, Tsuchiya, Okazaki and three hundred mounted soldiers went to Mount Ishibashi and set up barricades. I, Kagechika, gathered more than 1,000 soldiers and launched a fierce attack. Yoritomo’s force was cut down to seven or eight soldiers. In disarray, Yoritomo fled to Sugiyama in Doi to seek refuge.” Though this only mentions how Yoritomo fled to Sugiyama, Seison elaborated on his reasons for creating the work and the difficulties he had with the process, writing “After being defeated at Mount Ishibashi, Minamoto no Yoritomo hid away in Fushiki, but it seems he actually concealed himself in a rock cave near to Fushiki, so I decided to paint that. However, I hadn’t painted a samurai painting for a long time. Moreover, each person was painted larger than life, so I couldn’t make even the slightest mistake. I had to research every piece of armor and every garment color. In the end, I kept working for three months without a day’s rest” (Maeda Seison, Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, September 1, 1929).

The painting would become one of Seison’s most famous works and after finishing it he was inundated with requests to paint similar works. This painting here appears similar to the one Seison submitted to the Revived Exhibition. It was apparently created around the same time as a similarly-themed work that was displayed at the 1st Seiyo-kai Exhibition, held at Matsuya Ginza in April 1948. Seison threw himself into the study of armor, so much so that he even published Japanese Armor: Maeda Seison’s Sketchbook (Chuo koron bijutsu Publishing, 1957), which faithfully depicts representative sets of armor from across Japan. When discussing the Revived Exhibition painting, though, Seison said he had concentrated too much on the armor and instead should have deepened the internal emotion of the characters a little more. Though the work already shows the expressions of the seven protagonists up close, it seems Seison wanted to focus even more on the psychology of Yoritomo and his men as they listened, with nerves on edge, for sounds of the enemy approaching the cave.

Maeda Seison (nihonga painter; 1885–1977)
Nihonga painter from Gifu Prefecture. A student of Kajita Hanko, Seison was an important member of the Tatsumi-gakai and Koji-kai art associations. Alongside Kobayashi Kokei and Yasuda Yukihiko, he is regarded as one of the three outstanding nihonga masters of the Japan Art Institute. His artistic range includes history painting, the human figure and bird–and–flower painting, for which he used refined lines and techniques such as tarashikomi (a wet-in-wet pooling effect). Member of the Imperial Art Academy and Imperial Household Artist, jury member of the Nitten exhibition, Seison also served as a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts, was designated a Person of Cultural Merit and received the Order of Culture.