The war between the Minamoto and Taira clans, fought from 1180 to 1185, supplied Japanese painters with stories for centuries. In this pair of screens, the fighting spreads across a landscape of hills, buildings and water. Horsemen charge and turn, soldiers press through narrow passages, and boats carry the action out from the shore. The scenes reward close looking: individual figures, armour and banners remain legible within the sweep of the composition.

Banks of gold cloud divide the narrative into episodes while allowing the eye to travel from one encounter to the next. Against them, the dark stretches of water and landscape give the screens much of their force. The painter moves between crowded passages of combat and quieter spaces, giving a vast story room to unfold across twelve panels.

The screens belong to the long pictorial tradition shaped by the Tale of the Heike, in which the Genpei War is remembered through both its battles and the lives caught up in them. Made around four centuries after the events they depict, they show how enduring those stories remained at the turn of the seventeenth century. The pair was discussed by Tsuji Nobuo in Kokka in 1998.