The Great Elephant from a Foreign Land (Ikoku watari dai zo no zu)

This 1863 woodblock print, an ōban triptych titled "The Great Elephant from a Foreign Land" (Ikoku watari dai zō no zu), is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number 1926.1807, gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne). The print belongs to the rich genre of late-Edo news prints that responded to the foreign curiosities arriving in Japan in the wake of the country's opening to the West in 1854, and specifically to the tradition of zō no zu (elephant pictures) that had a long history in Japanese print culture going back to the celebrated arrival of an elephant in Edo in the 1720s. The Bakumatsu period saw a fresh wave of such imports as foreign animal shows toured the treaty ports, and Yoshiharu's triptych adapts the late-Utagawa idiom to capture the spectacle of a live elephant on Japanese soil. The composition spreads across three ōban sheets to give the animal its full proportions, and the date of 1863 places it in the most active years of his Bakumatsu output, when the Edo print industry was producing a steady stream of topical prints documenting foreign novelties, political crises, and street rumours. The print is a representative example of the news-print sensibility that animated Utagawa-school designers in their final pre-Meiji years and is part of the Art Institute of Chicago's substantial collection of Japanese woodblock prints, much of which entered the museum through the Chadbourne gift.