Price on request

Tracked across 81 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Nobukuni信國

Nobukuni is the Yamashiro master at the head of his school, a Kyoto smith of the Ryōkai line who worked through the Nanbokuchō period and, by tradition, carried the Rai inheritance into the age of Sōshū. The published sources record his descent in one sentence and then complicate it: he was a smith of the Ryōkai line who, they say, "is also said to have studied under Sadamune of Sagami" (相州貞宗にも学んだと伝えている). From those two roots, the Yamashiro Rai tradition and the Sōshū study under Sadamune, the whole shape of his work follows. The earliest reliably dated pieces fall in the Enbun, Kōan and Jōji years; the Meikan's older Kenmu date is set aside because nothing survives to support it. This is the Nanbokuchō Nobukuni, the shodai together with the late-Nanbokuchō successor who carried the name on after him, and the published commentary is careful to hold both apart from the early-Muromachi Ōei Nobukuni, Saemon-no-jō and Shikibu-no-jō, who came later. His hand is most surely read in the carving. The school's *horimono*, a devotional program of *bonji*, *kurikara*, *suken* and *gomabashi*, banner-and-halberd reliefs, and the invocation "Namu Hachiman Daibosatsu" cut into the blade, recurs across the corpus and is the hereditary specialty the published sources single out, calling it work "of a hereditary art, executed with notable skill" (御家芸とも言うべき彫物は流石に上手). It appears on roughly half his surviving blades, against the plain *bō-hi* of the rest, and on the finest pieces a long flame-framed *bonji* and a *suken* on a lotus pedestal are layered together in *kasanebori*. Few smiths of his time are so consistently identified by what they carved. The steel beneath carries the Sōshū descent plainly. Over an *itame* that stands and flows toward *masame*, the *jigane* takes a thick *ji-nie* with *chikei* entering frequently, and on the finer-forged blades a pale, streak-like *nie-utsuri* stands in the *ji*. The published sources read the thickly laid *ji-nie* and frequent *chikei* as the visible influence of the Sōshū tradition, the trace of the study under Sadamune. The hamon is laid in *nie* whatever its pattern, with *sunagashi* and *kinsuji* running through it, the *nioiguchi* bright, and the *bōshi* most often *midare-komi* with *hakikake*, or running straight into a *ko-maru*. The published sources divide his work into three manners, and the division is the key to the smith. The first is "a *suguha* showing the Kyō tradition," the refined straight temper of *ko-nie* with fine *hotsure* and a faint *nijūba*, carried on the *tantō*, *ko-wakizashi* and *ken*; a dated *suguha* piece they call an elegant work that "faithfully inherited the manner of the Rai antecedents" (先祖の来の風をよく継承した). The second is "a *notare* temper that inherits the Sadamune manner" (京物の伝統を示した直刃と貞宗風を受け継いだ, the two modes named together), a *ko-notare* mixed with *gunome*, well laid in *nie* with conspicuous *yubashiri*, the most frequently met of his styles. The third belongs to the successor generation, which first produces *tachi* and adds, beyond the two inherited modes, a lively *gunome*-based *midare*. Its tell is named again and again: pairs of *gunome* set side by side and "linked across the valleys by a low, small *notare*" (互の目が二箇宛連れたものを腰の低い小のたれの刃で繋ぐ), taking on a *yahazu*, arrow-notch, profile. On the most animated late blades *muneyaki*, *tobiyaki*, *yubashiri* and *nijūba* enter as well. What sets him apart is held within his own work rather than borrowed from a comparison. The Rai-derived *suguha* keeps him in the Kyō tradition; the *nie*-rich *jigane*, thick with *chikei*, marks the Sadamune study; and the paired-*gunome* *yahazu* of the late hand is the feature by which the daigawari Nobukuni is recognized. The published sources distinguish that late mode from the Ōei Nobukuni who follow, noting that in the late-Nanbokuchō hand the disorder is "broken down in a more cursive manner than in the Ōei Nobukuni," a point used to keep the generations separate. They are equally candid that the name was shared: "there appear to have been several smiths of the same signature in the Nanbokuchō period" (南北朝時代にも同銘数工あったと見られる), and a Meitoku-3 tachi signed Genzaemon-no-jō Nobukuni is by a different hand than the two-character Nobukuni of the same year. For the collector he is a name encountered with patience rather than at will. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties on record; his standing rests instead on two Tokubetsu Jūyō and twenty-nine Jūyō blades, thirty-one in the Tokubetsu Jūyō and Jūyō tiers together, with a prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin among them and Hon'ami Kōchū origami attached to several. Signed, dated, *ubu* Nobukuni of the Nanbokuchō are uncommon, since the shodai's signed work is confined to *tantō* and *ko-wakizashi*, so the dated late-Nanbokuchō *tachi* and *naginata* are prized above all as reference material. Of recorded whereabouts, his blades are held in long-standing collections and institutions, one of the *tantō* preserved in the Samurai Art Museum in Berlin, with documented provenance to the Hisamatsu Matsudaira family, the Ōta collection and, in one instance, the Imperial Family. None of these is locked away as designated patrimony, so a signed example does, from time to time, pass into private hands; it comes to the serious collector only seldom, and a dated, carved tachi by the Nanbokuchō Nobukuni is a landmark when it does.

Nihonto Australia

nihonto.com.au