King of Holland

This 1861 vertical ōban [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) (color woodblock print), held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession number P.75.51.244), depicts the King of Holland (Oranda kokuō) and is dated to the first lunar month of 1861. The print belongs to Yoshitsuya's broader 1861 engagement with foreign-portrait subjects, parallel to his Bankoku jinbutsu zue ("People of Barbarian Nations") series of the same year held at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Library of Congress. The dimensions recorded by the Minneapolis Institute of Art are 36.2 by 25 cm in the image area, the standard dimensions of a vertical ōban single sheet of the Bakumatsu period. The publisher is recorded as Ebiya Rinnosuke, one of the principal Bakumatsu Edo print publishers. The Dutch had been the only Western nation continuously present in Japan during the seclusion centuries through their Nagasaki trading post on Dejima, and a Japanese portrait of the King of Holland in 1861 carried a different historical resonance from the contemporaneous portraits of Americans and other recently-opened nationalities; the Dutch monarchy was the longest-standing Western political reference point in Japanese imagination. The print represents Yoshitsuya's continued engagement with the [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) and foreign-portrait genres in the closing years of his career and is preserved in the Minneapolis Institute of Art's collection of Japanese woodblock prints.