Russian Horseman

This 1860 color woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.235), is one of Utagawa Yoshitomi's earliest dated Yokohama-e and an example of the equestrian-portrait type that flourished in the genre's first wave. The image measures 37.5 by 26.7 centimeters and depicts a mounted Russian figure rendered with the close attention to foreign costume, horse trappings, and physiognomy that defined the Yokohama-e genre at its inception. The Russian Empire had signed its commercial treaty with Japan in 1858, and Russians were among the earliest foreign residents in the new treaty ports opened in 1859; equestrian subjects, which combined the documentary interest of foreign costume with the established Utagawa-school tradition of depicting horses and riders, were among the most popular early Yokohama-e formats. Yoshitomi's print belongs to the surge of Yokohama-e production that absorbed virtually the entire output of the younger Kuniyoshi pupils in 1860-1862. The print is signed in the Utagawa lineage and dates from the tenth month of Ansei 7 (late 1860), placing it within the very first season of Yokohama-e publishing. Lieberman, the museum's longtime curator and one of the great American collectors of nineteenth-century Japanese prints.