View of the Forum in Rome

This print at the Victoria and Albert Museum, dated 1770-1790, is one of the most striking objects in Toyoharu's surviving output: an Edo woodblock print depicting the Forum in Rome. Toyoharu produced a small group of designs that adapt European etchings of Italian and other foreign cities into the medium of the Japanese color woodblock print. Their visual sources are imported copperplate engravings of the kind associated with Giuseppe Vasi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and other Italian printmakers of the eighteenth century, brought into Japan through the Dutch trade and circulated among a small community of Edo collectors interested in 'Dutch studies' (rangaku). For Toyoharu, the Forum design was a particularly extreme test of his uki-e method: the original copperplate's perspective, with its ruins, columns, and shadowed archways, had to be translated into the technical vocabulary of the Edo woodblock workshop, including its limited palette and its absence of true engraving line. The result is the most cosmopolitan ukiyo-e of its generation and a key piece of evidence for how an Edo print designer of the late eighteenth century imagined the wider world.