SOLD

Tracked across 81 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Horikawa Yoshitake吉武

On the reverse of a katana dated to the sixth month of Enpo 3 (1675), the swordsmith Yoshitake's signature toward the mune is answered by a gold-inlaid cutting-test inscription recording that Tomita Shigetsuna cut through three bodies in two passes. Yoshitake worked in the Horikawa line of Yamashiro and later of Edo, the son of Heianjo Kunitake, who was himself a disciple of Horikawa Kunihiro, the founder of the Kyoto Shinto school. He was commonly called Kawate Ichidayu, received the court title Izumo Daijo and later Izumo no Kami, and in his late years took the tonsure under the name Hotetsu Nyudo. The published sources hold that, while his father Kunitake was among the more unremarkable smiths of the Horikawa group, Yoshitake was a craftsman 'who surpassed his father,' and that he 'conveys the boldness characteristic of Horikawa works' over a good jigane. His dated blades carry him from Enpo 3 through the Tenna era and on to Shotoku 1 (1711), a span that follows his move from Kyoto to the new capital at Edo. His recognized strength is a broad, calm suguha. The published sources say plainly that 'he particularly excelled in works in a suguha-based style,' and they set that manner beside the Hojoji school, noting that many of his blades show the kind of suguha seen in that lineage. On the dated Enpo 3 katana the hardened edge is a wide suguha-cho with gunome mixed in, ashi entering and ko-nie adhering, the nioiguchi deep, over a ko-itame closely packed with mokume and ji-nie. The shape is a dignified shinogi-zukuri of wide mihaba, shallow sori and chu-kissaki, the nakago left ubu with an iriyama-gata tip and sujikai or katte-sagari file marks, and on these cutting-test pieces the long signature toward the mune is answered on the ura by Shigetsuna's gold-inlaid record of the trial. The boshi runs straight and turns back in a small round. Beside this steady manner runs a more active one. Over a ko-itame and itame mixed with mokume, the jigane tends at times toward a standing grain, with a touch of o-hada gathering at the koshimoto and ji-nie present throughout, the good Horikawa steel the sources credit him with. On the Tenna katana, which the published sources call one of his finest works, the temper is a ko-notare mixed with gunome and ear-shaped elements, ashi and yo entering, the nioiguchi deep and clear, fine ko-nie well-adhering and sunagashi appearing; the boshi is straight to a small round with a brushed, swept tip. A second of his finest blades runs a notare-based line with gunome and large gunome, the nioi deep and nie well-adhering, a slight suggestion of sunagashi crossing the lower half. The whole of this register reaches what the sources liken to the billowing 'toran-style midare,' and it is in this gunome-based work, rather than in the quiet suguha, that the breadth of his hand is most visible. The two manners answer to the two halves of his career and to the company he kept. The published sources record that, although Yoshitake originally drew on the stream of the Horikawa group, in Edo his work grew close to the Hojoji school, citing as evidence collaborative blades produced jointly with Hojoji Shosho. From those joint works they infer that he maintained a notably deep relationship with that lineage, and they read the gunome-based tempering of his midare blades as confirming the same connection; the suguha that is his forte is, in their account, the very manner of the Hojoji line. His mei track the same arc. The earliest dated works sign Izumo Daijo Fujiwara Yoshitake in a large, long inscription cut toward the mune; later blades carry a date of Shotoku 1 and are signed Hotetsu Nyudo, by which time he had advanced his title to Izumo no Kami. What the published sources press, across all four of the designated katana, is that Yoshitake stood above the father from whom he descended. Kunitake is named among the plainer hands of the Horikawa group, and the texts measure the son against him directly, calling Yoshitake a noted craftsman who surpassed his father and who carried the boldness of Horikawa work forward on a sound jigane. His own tell is therefore double: the wide suguha that the sources treat as his particular strength, and beside it the toran-leaning gunome-midare of his Edo years, the one quiet and the other active, both laid over the closely forged ko-itame and mokume jigane with ji-nie that is constant in his work. The judges describe individual blades as a 'standing-out example' and as among his finest, the language of a smith valued not as a school epigone but as a hand who outgrew his origins. Yoshitake's record on the books is small and entirely signed: four katana, all at the rank of Juyo Token, with none carried to the higher national designations and no recorded provenance in daimyo houses. Two of the four carry gold-inlaid cutting-test inscriptions by Tomita Shigetsuna, one recording a cut through two bodies and the other through three, which fix the blades to Enpo 3 and lend them documentary weight beyond the temper. Fujishiro rates him Jo-saku, a measure of solid competence rather than of the first rank, and the designated blades are held privately, having passed through collections in Saitama, Ibaraki and Tokyo by the time of their shinsa. A signed Yoshitake of this grade is not beyond the reach of a patient collector in the way a nationally designated blade is, but with only a handful on record and a cutting-test example rarer still, one comes to market seldom, and a saidan-mei piece is a notable thing when it does.

Samurai Museum

samuraimuseum.jp