French Pastimes

This Yokohama-e woodblock print, signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo and dated to 1860 (the first year of the Man'en era), depicts the pastimes and customs of French residents at the newly opened treaty port of Yokohama. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the sheet under accession number JP3334; it is printed in ink and color on paper at ōban dimensions of roughly 36.8 by 25.4 cm. The treaty port of Yokohama had been established in the summer of 1859 following the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce, and from the spring of 1860 onward Edo publishers were issuing dozens of single-sheet Yokohama-e portraying the foreigners who had taken up residence there. Yoshitoyo was one of the most active designers of Yokohama-e during this brief but intense early period, working alongside his fellow Kuniyoshi pupils Yoshikazu and Yoshitora and the senior Utagawa designer Sadahide. The genre served a public hungry for visual information about the appearance and customs of these strangers, and prints typically include cartouches identifying the nationality of the figures and brief commentaries on their habits and manners. "French Pastimes" belongs to that documentary tradition, and like the rest of the Yoshitoyo Yokohama-e corpus it is precisely datable thanks to the Tokugawa censorship system which required every published print to carry a date seal. The sheet is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of late-Edo prints and is a representative example of the foreigner-picture genre that briefly flourished in Edo in the years immediately before the Meiji Restoration.