The Elephant Dream

The Elephant Dream, recorded through the ukiyo-e.org archive, is one of the more enigmatic works in Tomioka Eisen's documented output, with a title suggesting a narrative drawn from Buddhist iconography or popular legend. The elephant carries deep associations in Japanese Buddhist culture, including the white elephant of Queen Maya's dream said to herald the birth of the Buddha, and elephants appeared throughout ukiyo-e in both religious and humorous contexts. Eisen's treatment of the subject indicates the range of narrative and symbolic territory that his prints engaged, well beyond the standard bijin-ga repertoire, and shows the Hokusai school sensibility he inherited for mixing the sacred and the popular within a single visual vocabulary.