England (Igirisu koku)

This 1865 color woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)) in the standard ōban format, held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number from the 1926 Chadbourne gift), is titled "England (Igirisu koku)" and belongs to one of Utagawa Yoshitora's later national-portrait series of the mid-1860s. By 1865 Yoshitora had been designing [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) for half a decade and had refined the iconography of foreign nations into a recognizable repertoire of costume, posture, and accompanying detail. The print depicts England through the convention of a single representative national figure with attendant attributes; such national-portrait prints had become a staple of late Bakumatsu Yokohama-e and were collected eagerly by Edo and Yokohama audiences as compact visual encyclopedias of the foreign world. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago's extensive holdings of Yoshitora's Yokohama-e assembled through the gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne in 1926, and it represents the mature mid-1860s phase of the genre, before the political upheavals of 1867-1868 transformed the Japanese print industry and reoriented Yoshitora's career toward Meiji modernization subjects.