Foreigners Enjoying a Banquet

This 1862 triptych of woodblock prints, ink and color on paper, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.174a-c), is a richly decorated Yokohama-e depicting Westerners enjoying a banquet within a foreign residence in Yokohama. The composition is unusually structured, with the central sheet measuring 44.8 by 24.8 cm and the flanking sheets at 35.6 cm and 35.2 cm in height, producing a vertically extended central panel that draws the eye toward the banquet table itself. The triptych shows foreign men and women seated at a Western-style table laid with foreign tableware, dishes, glasses, and bottles, with the harbor of Yokohama visible through the windows behind them. Banquet scenes were a recurring subject in Yokohama-e: they allowed designers to display the full panoply of Western consumer goods — porcelain, silver, glassware, table linens, exotic foods — within a single composition, and they situated foreigners within the domestic life of the new treaty port. Yoshikazu was the most prolific designer of such scenes, and his banquet compositions of 1861 and 1862 are among the most vivid surviving images of foreign domestic life in early Yokohama. The print is signed Issen Yoshikazu ga and dated to the 2nd month of 1862. Lieberman.