Englishman Walking for Pleasure

This Yokohama-e woodblock print, signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo and dated to the twelfth month of 1860, depicts an Englishman taking the air for pleasure, a quietly observational study of foreign manners at the newly opened Yokohama treaty port. Held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art under accession number 2007.49.246 and printed in ink and color on paper at ōban dimensions of roughly 35.2 by 25.4 cm, the print belongs to the very productive early Yokohama-e period of 1860, when Edo publishers were issuing single-sheet portraits of British, Dutch, French, American, and Russian residents at the treaty port to satisfy the curiosity of the Edo public. Yoshitoyo's Yokohama-e of this kind functioned as a kind of illustrated ethnography for the print-buying audience, with cartouches identifying the nationality of the figure and explanatory phrases describing what the person was doing. The choice of the simple act of an Englishman walking for pleasure, rather than any dramatic incident, is characteristic of the Yokohama-e genre's tendency to treat the foreign body as itself a spectacle: nothing more was needed than the costume, the bearing, and the unfamiliar setting to attract a buyer. The print is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of late-Edo Yokohama-period prints and is dateable to a precise month of late 1860 thanks to the Tokugawa censorship date seal.