…; purchased from the dealer Bernard Haase, London, by J.H.W. Goslings (1943-2011), Epse, near Deventer, 1999;¹¹Coll. cat. Goslings 2004, p. 12, cat. no. 328 by whom donated to the museum, 1999

Object number: RP-P-1999-249

Credit line: Gift of J.H.W. Goslings, Epse

Eisen also treated a similar subject in his series Ushiwaka and the Six Classical Poets, Ushiwaka rokkasen (see Keyes).²²Keyes, Roger S., Surimono: Privately Published Japanese Prints in the Spencer Museum of Art. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International Ltd., 1984, p. 23. Based on the reference to the cyclical Year of the Ox in the word 'Ushiwaka' - 'ox' being ushi in Japanese - Keyes dates that series to 1829. It could also date from around 1825 or 1826, when series of six surimono seem to have been the vogue.

At night, an old man is holding one end of a scroll that a young boy is reading. A silver moon against a dark sky.

The old man is Sojobo, king of the tengu, mythical beings; those known as 'crow tengu' or karasu tengu, half-man and half-crow, were expert fighters. The boy is Ushiwakamaru, as Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-89) was called in his youth. While still an infant, he was saved by his mother Tokiwa Gozen and later banished to the Kurama Mountains by Taira no Kiyomori - the Minamoto and Taira families being at war. There, however, he was trained in the art of fencing by King Sojobo and the tengu. Returning to the world, he defeated the warrior Benkei at Gojo Bridge in Kyoto, and spent the rest of his life fighting the Taira.

Six poems by Naone, Naoo, Yoshio, Shiragi, Tsukio and Higashio.

Issued by the poets
Signature reading: Yanagawa Shigenobu, with illegible seal

M. Forrer, Surimono in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Leiden 2013, no. 375

M. Forrer, 2013, ', Yanagawa (II) Shigenobu, Young Boy Reading a Scroll Held by an Old Man, Japan, 1829', in Surimono from the Goslings Collection in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200413489