Railway Station Triptych (Sheet from JP3227)

This sheet, one of three from a triptych of polychrome woodblock prints held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP3227, gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1959), is part of Ikkei's small but historically important group of railway and station prints documenting the new Meiji transport infrastructure. The complete triptych depicts a railway station scene, almost certainly the new Shimbashi terminus or one of the line's intermediate stops on the Tokyo-Yokohama route that opened in 1872, with the locomotive, passenger carriages, and a crowd of Japanese and foreign travelers arranged across the three panels. The Metropolitan's catalog classifies the work as both ukiyo-e and yokohama-e — the latter a subgenre of late Edo and early Meiji prints documenting the foreign community at Yokohama and the broader Japanese encounter with Western technology and dress. The print exemplifies Ikkei's characteristic flat color treatment, saturated early-Meiji aniline palette, and crowded foreground figure arrangement, and provides one of the few surviving images of the inaugural moment of Japanese railway travel. The Lincoln Kirstein gift of 1959 brought a substantial group of early Meiji prints into the Metropolitan's collection, of which this is one of the more historically resonant.