Harbor with Lighthouse and American Men and Ships

This late-nineteenth-century color woodblock [triptych](/glossary/triptych) by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by Harvard Art Museums (accession HUAM-INV017000), depicts a Meiji-era harbor scene with a lighthouse and American men and ships. The composition belongs to the [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) (Yokohama print) genre that flourished from the opening of the Yokohama foreign settlement in 1859 through the early Meiji period, in which Japanese print designers recorded the foreign ships, foreign merchants, foreign architecture, and foreign technology that entered Japanese view through the new treaty ports at Yokohama, Kōbe, Nagasaki, and Hakodate.