Le Singe et le Dauphin (The Monkey and the Dolphin), from Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio

Le Singe et le Dauphin (The Monkey and the Dolphin) is a color woodblock print designed by Okakura Shūsui for the 1894 Tokyo-Paris co-publication Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio sous la direction de P. Barboutau. The print, signed in Roman-letter transcription as "Oka-Koura-Shiou-Soui," illustrates La Fontaine's fable of the monkey who, clinging to a dolphin during a shipwreck off the coast of ancient Piraeus, claims (when the dolphin asks him whether he knows Piraeus) to know it as a person, only for the dolphin — recognizing the false boast — to plunge back into the depths and let the monkey drown. Shūsui's composition centers on the storm-tossed sea with a small Japanese-style ship listing in the upper register and the monkey and dolphin filling the lower foreground; the linework is in the tightly drawn Kanō school manner he had learned under Kanō Hōgai, and the brilliant color is printed from a series of separate color blocks at the Tsukiji-Tokyo workshop where the Barboutau project was executed. The print is one of the twenty-eight plates in the original two-volume yamato-toji set, published in Tokyo by the Tsoukidji printing house and distributed in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in an edition of 200 copies on hōsho paper. Original copies of the 1894 set are held by the Rijksmuseum (RP-P-OB-JAP-63), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica ark:/12148/btv1b105083718), the Lyon Collection, and other major repositories. The image is reproduced from the BNF-Gallica scan, in the public domain.