View of the Large Imported Elephant

This woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), ink and color on paper, dated the 4th month of Bunkyū 3 (1863) and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3284), is one of the most distinctive of Yoshimori's Bakumatsu prints. The image measures 37.5 by 25.9 cm and depicts a large elephant imported through Yokohama and put on public exhibition in Edo in Bunkyū 3, one of the most heavily attended spectacles of the early treaty-port years. Imported live elephants were an extreme rarity in Edo Japan — the previous arrival of one, in 1729, had occasioned a state procession that was itself the subject of woodblock prints — and the 1863 exhibition drew large crowds and a corresponding flood of commemorative prints from Edo publishers. Yoshimori's design treats the elephant as both a documentary subject and an emblem of the new foreign trade that flowed through Yokohama, with the animal's massive bulk filling the composition and Japanese spectators arranged at its sides. The print is signed Yoshimori ga and is dated to the 4th month of Bunkyū 3. The Met record attributes it to Taguchi (Utagawa) Yoshimori, recording his given family name. It entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1959 as a gift from Lincoln Kirstein.