Fishing (Senadori no zu), from the series "Dutch Perspective Pictures (Oranda uki-e)"

This [oban](/glossary/oban) color woodblock print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated c. 1768, belongs to the series 'Dutch Perspective Pictures' (Oranda uki-e), one of the openly experimental projects in which Utagawa Toyoharu announced the European source of his pictorial method directly in the title. The print depicts senadori, a form of riverine fishing, organised as a deep perspective recession into the picture plane. By marketing the series as 'Dutch' (Oranda), Toyoharu signalled to Edo buyers that what they were seeing was an example of the optical novelty associated with imported books and prints arriving through the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, even though the subject itself is unmistakably a Japanese genre scene. The print is an important early example of Toyoharu's effort to push uki-e beyond the architectural interiors of his predecessors into open landscape, where the perspective system has to do the work of organising space across distance rather than between walls. As a sumizuri-e or limited color print of this period, it also demonstrates how the technical leap of [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) in 1765 had begun to be deployed in service of perspective rather than only in service of decorative color. Together with the other surviving Oranda uki-e sheets, this design is a key piece of evidence for the moment when European linear perspective entered [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) through a deliberate authorial program rather than as an accidental influence.