Picture of a Banquet of People of Five Nations at the Gankiro Teahouse (Gokakoku gankiro ni oite sakamori no zu)
五ヶ国 岩亀楼ニ於テ酒盛之図
- Date:
- 1860
- Medium:
- Color woodblock prints; oban triptych
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
五ヶ国 岩亀楼ニ於テ酒盛之図
Picture of a Banquet of People of Five Nations at the Gankirō Teahouse (Gokakoku gankirō ni oite sakamori no zu) is an [oban](/glossary/oban) [triptych](/glossary/triptych) color woodblock print designed by Ochiai Yoshiiku and published in Edo in 1860, one of the foundational images of the [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) (Yokohama pictures) genre that flourished briefly and intensely after the opening of the treaty port at Yokohama in 1859. The Gankirō was the largest and most famous of the new pleasure houses built for foreign traders in the Yokohama foreign settlement, and quickly became iconic enough in Edo popular imagination to support a small industry of prints showing its public rooms, its courtesans, and the foreign clientele entertained there. Yoshiiku's triptych shows visitors from the five treaty nations — England, France, Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States — drinking and being entertained by Japanese women in one of the Gankirō's banquet rooms, the foreigners distinguished by Yoshiiku from a generation of Edo-trained eyes by their dress, posture, hair, and skin color. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (1934.55) is among the standard reference impressions for the print, which entered the Buckingham collection of Japanese prints and helped establish Yoshiiku's reputation as a documentarian of bakumatsu Yokohama. Like the parallel triptychs by Utagawa Sadahide and Yoshitora, the design combines diplomatic curiosity, commercial spectacle, and the older [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition of the pleasure-house interior, and is studied today both as a record of early Meiji exoticism and as a key piece of Yokohama-e printmaking.
Picture of a Banquet of People of Five Nations at the Gankiro Teahouse (Gokakoku gankiro ni oite sakamori no zu) (五ヶ国 岩亀楼ニ於テ酒盛之図) was created by Ochiai Yoshiiku (落合芳幾) in 1860.
