The Bull

The Bull is recorded in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago under the name of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), the great late-Edo ukiyo-e designer whose warrior prints helped redefine the visual language of the Utagawa school. The Art Institute's record assigns the print a date of 1928, well after Kuniyoshi's death, which indicates that the impression is a later reprint or commemorative issue produced from Kuniyoshi blocks or in his manner during the early twentieth century. Such reprints were a regular feature of the ukiyo-e trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in Edo-period designs revived and surviving blocks or new cuttings were used to satisfy a growing collector market. The image itself draws on Kuniyoshi's well-known interest in animals: alongside his warrior prints he produced cats, fish, horses and other creatures observed with both humor and anatomical precision, and a bull subject fits naturally within that strand of his work. Kuniyoshi trained under Utagawa Toyokuni I and emerged as a leading designer in Edo in the late 1820s, going on to create some of the period's most memorable warrior prints, including the heroes of the Suikoden. His reputation as a draftsman of animals as well as warriors helps explain why an image like The Bull would have been considered worth reprinting decades later. The Art Institute of Chicago houses a substantial Japanese print collection in which both original Edo ukiyo-e and later impressions are catalogued, and the museum's record for this sheet provides the primary documentary basis for the description given here.