Illustration of a Dutchman (Orandajin no zu)

This Yokohama-e woodblock print in ōban format, signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo and dated 1861, is titled "Illustration of a Dutchman" (Orandajin no zu, 和蘭人の図) and depicts a Dutch resident at the Yokohama treaty port. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet under accession number 1926.1628 as a gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, part of the institute's substantial collection of early Yokohama-e. The Dutch occupied a peculiar position in mid-nineteenth-century Japan: they had been the only Western nation with a continuous trading relationship with Japan throughout the Tokugawa seclusion, working from the small artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay; with the opening of Yokohama in 1859 the Dutch shifted some of their Japanese trade to the new treaty port and were among the most familiar Europeans to the Edo print-buying public. Yoshitoyo's print belongs to the mature Yokohama-e formula of 1861, with a precise national identification, a recognisable costume, and a posed and isolated foreign figure. The treatment of the Dutchman is typical of his single-sheet Yokohama-e: a careful documentary impulse combined with the bold outline and vivid colour of the Edo Utagawa-school print tradition transmitted to him by his teacher Kuniyoshi. The print is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection of late-Edo Japanese prints.