La grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le boeuf (The Frog That Wished to Be as Big as the Ox), from Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio

La grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le boeuf (The Frog That Wished to Be as Big as the Ox) is a color woodblock print designed by Okakura Shūsui for the 1894 Choix de fables de La Fontaine, the Tokyo-Paris illustrated book directed by Pierre Barboutau. The fable, one of the most famous in La Fontaine's collection, describes a frog who tries to swell herself to the size of a passing ox, only to burst from the effort — a moral on the dangers of vanity and imitation. Shūsui's composition places a large ox in the upper plane of the picture, with the small frog inflating itself in the marsh below, the two scales of the animals deliberately exaggerated to make the comic disproportion visible at a glance. The plate is signed in the lower margin as "Oka-Koura-Shiou-Soui" and was printed in color woodblock at the Tsukiji-Tokyo workshop. The image is reproduced from the BNF-Gallica scan of the 1894 first edition, in the public domain.