Newly Imported Great Elephant (Shinto hakurai no daizō)

This [diptych](/glossary/diptych) of woodblock prints ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)) in the vertical ōban format, signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo and dated 1863, depicts the celebrated imported Indian elephant that was displayed at Ryōgoku Hirokōji in Edo in the spring of that year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the diptych under accession number 2007.49.249a, b; each sheet measures roughly 36.2 by 24.1 cm and the two are printed in ink and color on paper. The Japanese title, "Shinto hakurai no daizō" (新渡舶来之大象, "Newly Imported Great Elephant"), is taken directly from the cartouche on the print, where it identifies the subject for the print-buying public. The 1863 elephant was a major Edo misemono (public attraction); it had been imported from India through Yokohama and was placed on view at Ryōgoku Hirokōji on the Sumida River, where it became the sensation of the spring entertainment season. Yoshitoyo, building on the journalistic tradition of his late teacher Kuniyoshi, produced several prints documenting the event; the present diptych is one of his most ambitious treatments and shows the elephant on a generous scale across the two sheets together with its handlers and the crowd of curious Edokko. The print belongs to a coherent Yoshitoyo elephant group of 1863 and is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of late-Edo Yokohama-period prints.