A Jingle for a Sniff

A small humorous illustration accompanying a short children's verse in Griffis's anthology. Ozawa Nankoku's drawing presents a figure leaning forward with theatrically pinched nose and dramatically rolled eyes, the gesture exaggerated for comic effect in the manner of late-Edo giga (caricature) drawing. The composition uses very little of the available rectangle, leaving generous unprinted ground around the figure so that the joke reads clearly at small reproduction size — a working illustrator's solution to the problem of placing a short verse and a vignette on the same page. Henry W. Troy's New York engraving has cut the line a little more boldly than in the mythological plates, an editorial choice consistent with the verse's comic register. The plate is small but is a useful index of Ozawa's facility outside the high mythological mode of the rest of the volume.