Votive Pictures (Ema), from the series "A Selection of Horses (Uma-zukushi)"

From around 1822, this Katsushika Hokusai print belongs to the series A Selection of Horses (Uma-zukushi) and depicts ema, the votive wooden tablets that worshippers traditionally hung at Shinto shrines bearing images of horses. The composition shows the ema themselves as objects of careful observation, their painted horse images visible within the frame of the wooden tablets, suspended at a shrine where pilgrims have left them as offerings. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet exemplifies the kyoka surimono and related private-commission traditions that flourished in the early nineteenth century, in which artists and poets collaborated on prints exploring specialized themes for refined audiences. The Uma-zukushi series surveyed horses in all their cultural guises: as warriors' mounts, as agricultural workhorses, as subjects of folk belief and religious practice, and as objects of veneration in their own right. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression of the print within its collection of Hokusai surimono and related works. The ema tradition itself reaches back to ancient Japan, when actual horses were sometimes offered to shrines as gifts to the kami; over time, painted or carved images of horses on wooden tablets substituted for the live animals, and these tablets became a familiar fixture of shrine precincts throughout the country. Hokusai's print thus operates on multiple levels: as a documentation of religious practice, as a self-referential commentary on the painted image of the horse, and as a beautifully composed still life of the tablets themselves. The work shows the artist's continued fascination with the intersections of folk belief, daily life, and visual representation, and it stands as a small but rich example of the surimono tradition of refined collaborative ukiyo-e printmaking.