Dutchwoman with Leopard, from the series Pictures of Birds and Animals (Chōjū zue)

This woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, dated the 7th month of 1860 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.238), is a single ōban sheet from Yoshimori's series Pictures of Birds and Animals (Chōjū zue). The image measures 36.2 by 24.1 cm and depicts a Dutchwoman in foreign dress accompanied by a leopard, a juxtaposition that placed exotic Western figures alongside exotic animal subjects in the syncretic visual logic that characterized Yokohama-e at its most inventive. The leopard, almost certainly imported through Yokohama as part of the small menagerie of foreign animals that publishers and showmen brought to the treaty port in the early 1860s, served simultaneously as ethnographic spectacle and as commercial novelty, and Yoshimori treats it with the same documentary attention as the woman's foreign dress. The print belongs to the broader set of Yokohama-e ōban that Edo publishers commissioned from Yoshimori and his Kuniyoshi-school colleagues in 1860 and 1861, when new designs were appearing on a nearly monthly basis. It is signed Yoshimori ga and bears the censor's seals and publisher's marks of the 7th month of 1860. The print entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 2005 through the Bequest of William S. Lieberman.