Osho, from The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijūshikō)

Osho, from The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijūshikō), illustrates one of the Chinese exempla collected in the classic anthology of model children: Wang Xiang (Japanese: Ōshō), who in the depth of winter lay down on a frozen lake to thaw the ice with his own body so that he could bring fresh fish home to his stepmother. The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety entered Japan in the medieval period and became a fixture of moral education and popular illustration; in the Edo period Utagawa Kuniyoshi designed at least one full series on the theme, treating each exemplum as the basis for a self-contained heroic-anecdotal print. As an Edo ukiyo-e designer best known for warrior prints, Kuniyoshi brought to the filial-piety subject the same sense of dramatic action and weather—the snow, ice, and exposed skin of the Wang Xiang legend lend themselves to the kind of physical, narrative composition at which he excelled. The print exemplifies how moral didacticism reached popular audiences in nineteenth-century Edo through the ukiyo-e medium, with the figure rendered in confident linework and the ice-and-water passages exploiting the printer's bokashi and karazuri techniques. The Harvard Art Museums record this impression without firm year; the series is consistent with his Tenpō and Kōka output. Source: Harvard Art Museums (object 206540).