A Foreigner and a Leopard Disguised as a Woman

This Yokohama-e woodblock print, signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo and dated to the seventh month of 1860, depicts a Western foreigner with a leopard that is fancifully said to be disguised as a woman. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the sheet under accession number 2007.49.245, printed in ink and color on paper at ōban dimensions of roughly 36.8 by 25.4 cm. The print belongs to the early Yokohama-e production of 1860, the first full calendar year after the opening of the Yokohama treaty port; it dates to the seventh month of that year, when Edo publishers were issuing single-sheet portraits of foreigners at a rapid pace. The subject is a characteristic example of the playful blending of journalistic observation and exotic fantasy that pervades Yoshitoyo's Yokohama prints: the foreigner is a recognizable English or Dutch figure but the leopard, ostensibly a household pet, is given a fictional double identity as a transformed woman, a conceit drawn from the visual repertoire of mitate (visual parody) and the supernatural transformations of kabuki and popular fiction. The print therefore stands at the intersection of Yokohama-e documentary and ukiyo-e fantasy, a junction that Yoshitoyo's small but distinctive œuvre occupied with unusual frequency. It is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of late-Edo prints.