An American, a French Woman, and a Chinese Servant

An American, a French Woman, and a Chinese Servant, dated 1860 and held by the Harvard Art Museums, is an Edo ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Hiroshige belonging to the genre of Yokohama-e, prints made in response to the opening of the treaty port at Yokohama in 1859. After the Tokugawa shogunate's reluctant agreement to permit foreign settlement, Edo publishers commissioned series of prints depicting the recent arrivals, and a number of late-career Utagawa designs are associated with this fashion. In this print Hiroshige presents an American man, a French woman and a Chinese servant arranged together as an informal group portrait, their clothing and accessories carefully observed even if certain details rest on second-hand information rather than direct study. The composition draws on the visual conventions of an Edo ukiyo-e figural print but inflects them with the novel iconography of Western dress, parasols, and other markers of the new international presence. While this is not a Utagawa Hiroshige landscape print in the meisho-e sense, the underlying interest in conveying observed reality, in this case the human cargo of the new port, links the design with his lifelong attention to the visible world. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the bright palette and decorative invention typical of Yokohama-e, and stands as an indication of how Hiroshige's late practice extended into the rapidly changing visual culture of Bakumatsu Japan.