Foreigners in the Drawing Room of Foreign Merchant's House in Yokohama

This triptych of woodblock prints by Utagawa Sadahide, dated to the ninth month of 1861 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.131a-c), depicts a scene inside the drawing room of a foreign merchant's house in Yokohama. The three sheets, each roughly 14 by 9-11 inches, present a domestic interior populated by Western men and women in mid-nineteenth-century European and American dress, surrounded by Western furniture, decorative objects, and architectural features such as patterned floors and curtained windows. The print is among Sadahide's most striking ethnographic compositions, recording for an Edo audience the unfamiliar visual world of the foreign settlement's private interiors. Sadahide is careful to distinguish the figures by nationality through dress, hairstyle, and physiognomy: Americans, English, Dutch, and other Westerners had quickly become familiar but still exotic presences in Yokohama, and Yokohama-e prints functioned partly as ethnographic guides to the new foreign population. The triptych also documents the material culture of the early treaty port: imported furnishings, costumes, and household goods that had no Japanese equivalent and that Sadahide rendered with characteristic care. The print is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's substantial collection of Sadahide's Yokohama-e and exemplifies his interest in domestic and interior scenes alongside the great harbor panoramas.