Zhang Xiao and Zhang Li (Cho Ko, Cho Rei), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Zhang Xiao and Zhang Li (Cho Ko, Cho Rei), an 1843 print from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), depicts the brothers whose mutual loyalty during a time of famine and banditry made them models of Confucian virtue. In the traditional story, the brothers each volunteer to be killed in the other's place when captured by brigands, and their devotion so moves the captors that both are released. Kuniyoshi treats the encounter with the same compositional confidence he brought to warrior prints, building the design around the contrast between the two brothers, who occupy the foreground in dignified poses, and the rough armed figures who challenge them. As an Edo ukiyo-e master of the Utagawa school, Kuniyoshi could move easily between samurai battles and Chinese moral exemplars, and here the dramatic potential of the source material clearly engages his imagination. The figure drawing is robust, the fabric patterns are rendered with characteristic Utagawa care, and the background, often a stylized landscape of mountains or trees, helps anchor the Chinese setting. Published under the constraints of the Tenpo Reforms, the Morokoshi nijushiko series allowed Kuniyoshi's circle to keep producing ambitious color woodblock work by anchoring it to virtuous Confucian content acceptable to shogunal censors. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression (artworks/149906) as part of its broader collection of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints, which together document Kuniyoshi's interest in extending his storytelling skills beyond Japanese warrior subjects.