Newly Published Perspective Picture of the Gate of the Palace of the Dragon King (Shinpan uki-e Ryugu karamon no zu)

This [oban](/glossary/oban) color woodblock print, in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated c. 1772/89, is another sheet from the 'Newly Published Perspective Picture' (Shinpan uki-e) project but applies the perspective system to a wholly imagined subject: the gate of Ryugu, the undersea Palace of the Dragon King. Ryugu appears in the folktales of Urashima Taro and in older Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, where it is the seat of the dragon king who rules the seas. By choosing this subject Toyoharu was able to combine the prestige of a 'Chinese-style' (karamon) gate, with its tiled roofs, layered eaves, and ornamental brackets, with the fanciful possibilities of an imaginary architecture, all set into an extreme orthogonal recession. The print belongs to a small tradition of fantastic-architecture uki-e in which the perspective device is used not to record a real place but to lend convincing solidity to an invented one. For Toyoharu's project of normalising European perspective in Edo prints, it is a particularly revealing example: the technique is good enough that even the gate of the dragon king feels like a building one could walk through.