Triptych: View of the Interior of the Gankirō Tea House in Yokohama (Yokohama Gankirō no zu), published by Daikokuya Kinnosuke

Designed in 1860 and published by Daikokuya Kinnosuke, this large triptych by Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the interior of the Gankiro, the celebrated licensed tea house in Yokohama that catered to the newly arrived foreign residents of the treaty port. Unlike Hiroshige's classic Edo ukiyo-e landscape print output, this composition is firmly in the Yokohama-e current that emerged after Japan opened its ports in 1859, and the artist treats the subject more as architectural and figural reportage than as meisho-e in the traditional sense. The wide triptych format allows Hiroshige to lay out the Gankiro's main hall across three sheets, with foreign men in Western dress mingling with Japanese courtesans, attendants, and entertainers under the building's tall, gilded interior. The figures are rendered with crisp outline and saturated color, and the receding architecture provides a strong perspective armature. As one of the last works of Hiroshige's long career, this Yokohama print captures the moment when the closed-port world that shaped his earlier landscape prints had begun visibly to dissolve. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the bright reds and golds of a fine early printing.