A French Woman of a Yokohama Merchant House Enjoying Goldfish

Yokohama Prints
The prints depicting foreigners in the 1860s and 1870s at the newly opened port of Yokohama were called Yokohama prints, despite being published in Edo (Tokyo). To help satisfy public curiosity, Edo print publishers sent some artists to Yokohama to sketch the foreigners and quickly and inexpensively published the depictions in woodblock prints. The Japanese artists’ struggle to depict the unfamiliar foreigners led to odd pictorial conventions, which lent the Yokohama prints a warmth and humorous charm.
Among the countries represented by the figures in the prints in this gallery are China and the five nations which signed trade treaties with Japan in 1858: the United States, England, France, Holland, and Russia. Except for the Chinese men, it is difficult to determine the nationality of each of these figures. The artists helped the nineteenth century Japanese identify the foreigners by writing their nationalities on the prints. Hundreds of Yokohama prints were published during a short period of time; however, their popularity quickly waned by the early 1880s., A woman dressed in a pink skirt with her hair ornamented with an elaborate comb is seated on a Chinese-style bench, admiring red goldfish swimming in a large rectangular tank. On the wall behind her is a large framed portrait painting of a man with curly hair who is wearing a blue jacket and a large brown hat. Holding a goblet, he looks down toward the woman. Nineteenth-century Japanese were curious to see framed oil paintings installed on interior walls of foreigners’ residences in Yokohama.