National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

On the back of the lid of the box for the painting, Tosa Mitsusada, a painter of the Tosa School in the Edo period, wrote an inscription in 1789. According to the inscription, this portrait of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa was drawn by Tosa Mitsunobu and has since been handed down through the generations of the Tosa family. The subject of this painting is represented as a person with a stern look and a fan made of Japanese cypress, suggesting that he must be a man of noble rank. Different from other existing portraits of Shogun Ashikaga, this one also depicts fusuma (paper sliding doors) with ink landscape paintings in the background and a gold-lacquered mirror stand. It is too small to call a portrait and it does not bear a legend. On the fusuma, a landscape is drawn in sumi ink, where thin pine trees are represented in the style of Shubun. It seems that a sketch of Ashikaga Yoshimasa was actually created in front of such fusuma doors. The reason why the fusuma-e (painting on fusuma) was added to this portrait seems to be that it had a particular significance for Yoshimasa and the owner of the fusuma or the painter. Either Yoshimasa particularly loved the fusuma-e or it was drawn by the same painter. The mirror may have been placed for Yoshimasa to check his face before meeting someone or for ceremonies. Some say that it was placed there for Yoshimasa to check if the portrait really looked like him. It is worth noting that this portrait is small in size and has a different atmosphere from other official portraits. While it differs from a nise-e (sketchy realistic portrayal in the Kamakura period) sketched on a piece of paper, it shows intimacy with the subject or a sense of realism similar to nise-e.