Curio Shop in Yokohama

This triptych of woodblock prints by Utagawa Sadahide, dated to the third month of 1860 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.110a-c), depicts the interior of a curio shop (kottō-ya) in the newly opened port of Yokohama. The three sheets, each roughly 36.2 by 24.4-25.1 cm, present a richly populated scene in which Western buyers examine Japanese antiquities, ceramics, lacquerware, and decorative arts offered for sale by a Japanese merchant. The print documents one of the most distinctive economic phenomena of the early treaty-port years: the rapidly developing trade in Japanese art objects to foreign collectors, which became an enormous commercial activity in the 1860s and 1870s and which played a foundational role in the later Western enthusiasm for japonisme. Sadahide gives careful attention both to the merchandise (vessels, textiles, prints, and other goods that can be identified by type) and to the figures of the buyers, whose Western dress and physiognomy mark them as foreigners. The print is one of Sadahide's most informative compositions on the commercial life of the foreign settlement, complementing his harbor and trading-house views with a glimpse of the showrooms in which Japanese objects passed from one culture to another. The triptych is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of Yokohama-e and is a key document for the early history of the Japanese art trade.