Views of Foreigners (Gaikokujin no zu)

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 JP3324) and is a single sheet from Utagawa Yoshitomi's series "Views of Foreigners" (Gaikokujin no zu), produced at the height of the Yokohama-e season of 1861. The image measures 36.8 by 25.4 centimeters and presents a figure of a treaty-port foreigner observed with the close attention to costume, posture, and accompanying attributes that defined the Yokohama-e genre's ethnographic mode. The Gaikokujin no zu series belonged to a family of single-sheet portrait series — produced by Yoshitomi, Yoshikazu, Yoshitora, Sadahide, and others of the younger Kuniyoshi pupils — that gave Japanese audiences compact visual encyclopedias of the foreign nations newly established in the treaty ports. Such national-portrait prints became a staple of early Yokohama-e and were collected eagerly by Edo and Yokohama audiences eager to make sense of the foreigners now visible in the small Yokohama settlement. The print belongs to the Henry L. Phillips Collection at the Metropolitan Museum and entered the museum in 1939 through the Bequest of Henry L. Phillips, an important early-twentieth-century American collector of Japanese woodblock prints whose holdings of Bakumatsu material form one of the foundations of the Met's Yokohama-e collection.