Shun the Great (Dai Shun), from the series The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijūshi kō)

Shun the Great (Dai Shun) is a sheet from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Edo ukiyo-e series The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushi ko), an 1848 reworking of the Confucian moral compendium that the Utagawa-school artist had already addressed earlier in the decade. The story of Shun, the legendary sage-emperor, opens the canonical list of paragons: as a young man, despite cruel mistreatment from his stepmother and half-brother, he labored in the fields with such devoted virtue that elephants came to plough on his behalf and birds gathered to weed the soil. Kuniyoshi, although celebrated above all for warrior prints, here turns to the natural-wonder vocabulary of the tale, organizing the composition around the standing figure of Shun and the great animals and birds that surround him. The contour drawing is firm and confident, the elephants are rendered with a dramatic plasticity informed by Kuniyoshi's musha-e instincts, and the field setting allows the artist to deploy a richly layered color scheme. Issued in 1848 in the partial recovery from the Tenpo Reforms, the series allowed publishers to continue producing morally legitimated multi-block color prints. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (artworks/30535) as part of its deep Kuniyoshi holdings, where it represents the artist's ability to translate one of the most iconic Confucian tales of filial devotion into a striking and accessible Edo woodblock image.