An American Drawn from Life

This 1861 color woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, in the standard ōban format, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3329) and is one of Utagawa Yoshitomi's most documentary-minded Yokohama-e. Titled "An American Drawn from Life" — the title itself an explicit claim to firsthand observation — the print measures 36.2 by 25.4 centimeters and depicts an American figure rendered with the close attention to Western dress, posture, and physiognomy that distinguished Yoshitomi's portrait prints from the more imaginative reconstructions of foreigners produced by some of his contemporaries. By 1861 the American merchant and diplomatic presence in Yokohama had been established for two years, and the small foreign settlement offered Edo artists their first sustained opportunity to draw Americans from direct observation rather than from imported illustrated books. Such "drawn from life" (shasei) claims appear with increasing frequency in Yokohama-e of 1861, reflecting the rising emphasis on documentary precision as the genre matured. The print belongs to the Henry L. Phillips Collection at the Metropolitan Museum, bequeathed to the museum in 1939, and is among the most carefully observed of Yoshitomi's surviving Yokohama-e portraits.