A Foreign Residence in Yokohama

This 1861 [triptych](/glossary/triptych) of woodblock prints ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), ink and color on paper, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.159) and is one of Utagawa Yoshikazu's signature [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) compositions. The print measures 74.9 by 37.5 cm at the image and depicts a Western-style residence at the foreign settlement in Yokohama, with foreign men and women going about domestic and commercial activities in and around the building. The treaty port of Yokohama, opened to foreign residence in 1859 following the Harris Treaty of 1858, had by 1861 acquired the characteristic appearance of a hybrid Japanese-Western settlement, with European-style frame houses and merchant compounds built alongside Japanese vernacular architecture. Yoshikazu's print belongs to the dense visual reportage that Edo publishers commissioned in 1860 and 1861 to satisfy the public appetite for images of the new foreign presence. The composition is enlivened by the inclusion of foreign costume, foreign tools and goods, and the energetic figural drawing that Yoshikazu had inherited from his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi. The print is signed Issen Yoshikazu ga and bears the censor's seals and publisher's marks of 1861, fixing it firmly within the Bakumatsu peak of Yokohama-e production. The print entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 2005 through the Bequest of William S. Lieberman, the museum's longtime curator and a great connoisseur of nineteenth-century Japanese prints, whose Yoshikazu group at the Met is among the most important in the United States.