1865

The Country of England

Japanese, 1836 - 1887

Japanese artists relied heavily on Western illustrations for the architectural elements in their imagined views of foreign lands. Since the artists found foreign language captions incomprehensible, buildings were randomly chosen and often reused in depictions of different countries, which frequently resulted in strikingly inaccurate and bizarre juxtapositions. For this view of England Yoshitora selected, perhaps unwittingly, two appropriate images of British churches that appeared as illustrations in an 1864 edition of the Illustrated London News.