¥9,500,000

Tracked across 76 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Horikawa Kunisuke國助

Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke is an Osaka Shintō name carried by two hands, and the published sources keep the two carefully apart. The first generation went up to Kyoto and entered the school of Horikawa Kunihiro as a late disciple; when Kunihiro died in Keichō 19 he moved to Ōsaka together with Izumi no Kami Kunisada, the elder Kunisada, and the two became pioneers of the Ōsaka Shintō tradition. He was, by tradition, from Kanbe in Ise Province and of Ishidō descent, and the published record makes that descent the key to his hand: among Kunihiro's pupils he was, in their words, the one who 'most excelled at chōji' (最も丁子を得意とし), so that some trace of clove pattern always surfaces somewhere within his irregular temper. Several of the same entries judge from his style and the manner of his signature that his real teacher in practice was the senior fellow-disciple Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, rather than Kunihiro alone. His recognized hand is a shinogi-zukuri katana of standard width with shallow sori and a chū-kissaki, forged in a tightly packed *ko-itame* with abundant *ji-nie*. From a straight *yakidashi* at the base the temper opens into a *chōji-midare* mixed with *gunome* and a small *notare*, deep in *nioi* with *ko-nie* well adhered, *ashi* and *yō* entering, *sunagashi* and *kinsuji* running through, the *bōshi* turning sugu into a *ko-maru*. The prominence of clove within the *midare* is the very point on which the appraisal turns: where another Horikawa blade might pass without a name, the published sources note that within the Horikawa group the conspicuous *chōji* is what marks the work as Kunisuke's. His manner stands extremely close to that of the elder Kunisada with whom he came south, the two reading as companions of one Ōsaka beginning. The *jigane* is where the second register declares itself. On a number of his blades, and most plainly on his wakizashi, the *itame* stands and turns *zanguri*, the loose rustic *jigane* of his master Kunihiro's school carried into Ōsaka, with thick *ji-nie* and *chikei*. Over that *jigane* the temper centres on a *ko-notare* mixed with *gunome*, the *ko-nie* deep within the edge, *sunagashi* running well and *kinsuji* entering, with *muneyaki* appearing at times. One katakiriba wakizashi the published sources read as 'a style of strong Horikawa colour' (堀川色の濃い作風), the standing *zanguri* hada and the *nie*-laden *ko-notare* an accomplished demonstration of what he learned; a relief *naginata-hi* with a companion groove and, on his finest blades, *goma-bashi* carving accompany this manner. This is the hand of a Horikawa pupil who never quite set down the Ishidō clove he was born to. The second generation, son of the first and known to the world as Naka-Kawachi, turns the other way. He forges a tightly knit, beautiful *ko-itame* and tempers a flamboyant clove centred on his own fist-shaped *kobushi-gata chōji*, mixed with *gunome* and varied so as never to fall into monotony, often opening from a long straight *yakidashi*, the *nioiguchi* tight, bright and clear, the *bōshi* sugu to *ko-maru*. The published sources call this 'the Ishidō house's own chōji' (石堂家本来の丁子を焼いて) and note that the Horikawa manner of his father is scarcely seen in it; his forte, they say, 'lies in a chōji-midare of fist-shaped clove, the well-ordered, beautiful jigane its point of appreciation' (拳形の丁子乱れにあり、地がねはよく整って美しい). His work was 'praised as a shintō Ichimonji' (新刀一文字と賞された) in its own day, and the sources add, with candour, that some pieces tempered motifs such as Mount Fuji or jewels and ran too far into technical display. What separates the line from its neighbours is exactly what the judges name. Set against the Tsuda smiths, who tempered the brilliant billowing *tōran*, Naka-Kawachi stood as a standard-bearer of the Ishidō lineage's original clove, his bright, fist-shaped *chōji* over a beautifully ordered *jigane* the counter to that wave. The first generation, for his part, is distinguished within his own school by his clove rather than against it, the one Horikawa pupil whose *midare* carries the old Bizen-derived clove of the Ishidō stock somewhere inside it. Father and son thus close the name from both sides: the shodai a Horikawa hand who kept the Ishidō clove, the nidai an Ishidō hand who put the Horikawa manner down. For the collector Kunisuke is one of the leading Ōsaka Shintō names, graded Jō-jō saku by Fujishiro. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs instead through the Jūyō rank, forty-eight blades across the two generations, with one katana carried in the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin, and the published commentary calls the shodai's finest signed work 'the outstanding one among his works' (同作中の傑出の一). Provenance is recorded for only a few: the Itakura daimyō house and the Imperial Family appear among the holders of his blades, the rest in private hands of unrecorded whereabouts. Extant works by the shodai are comparatively few, katana especially scarce, while Naka-Kawachi's survive in rather greater number. Only a handful fall in the tradeable tiers at any one time, so a signed Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke comes to market only from time to time, a well-made example of either generation a satisfying thing for a collector of Ōsaka Shintō to encounter and hold.

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