Woman riding an ox

Woman Riding an Ox is a small Hokusai design from around 1829, held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The image draws on a recurring motif in East Asian painting and poetry: a young woman seated sidesaddle on a placid ox, often associated with rural travel, pilgrimage, or scenes from classical literature. Hokusai's version uses a quiet, compact composition in which the slow body of the animal occupies most of the design while the figure of the woman rests gracefully along its back, draped in a flowing kimono. The format is in keeping with the surimono and small bijinga-and-genre designs Hokusai produced for private circulation and modest commercial publication during the late 1820s, alongside his landmark landscape series. The Art Institute of Chicago records the impression under Hokusai's name. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, Woman Riding an Ox is a useful reminder that the artist's late career was not exclusively devoted to landscape: he continued to produce figure compositions that drew on long traditions of literary and pastoral imagery. Such designs were valued by collectors of surimono and ehon, for whom the ability of Hokusai to encapsulate a poetic mood in a single quiet image was as important as his more spectacular landscape sheets. The print thus stands at an intersection of figure and landscape practice that defines much of Hokusai's most mature work in the woodblock medium.