Les Deux Taureaux et une grenouille (The Two Bulls and a Frog), from Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio

Les Deux Taureaux et une grenouille (The Two Bulls and a Frog) 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. La Fontaine's fable, drawn from Phaedrus, describes a frog watching two bulls fight in a meadow and lamenting that the loser will be driven into the marsh, where it will trample the frogs underfoot; the moral concerns the way in which the conflicts of the powerful spill over onto the weak. Shūsui's composition places two large bulls — drawn in the heavy outline of the Kanō-school animal vocabulary he had learned under Kanō Hōgai — in violent contact in the foreground, with the small frog observing the contest from a corner of the picture plane. 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.