Dutch Women Raising a Wineglass and Caring for a Child

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., This scene of a Dutch woman with her child and her maid is from a series titled Life Drawings of People of Foreign Nations; however, it was probably based on an earlier print from the Nagasaki School rather than on real-life observation. The original may have been the famous unsigned print Dutch Women attributed to Kawahara Keiga (1786–1866), which portrayed the wife and infant son of Jan Cock Blomhoff, a Dutch trading company head. Despite the Japanese government’s rule against traders’ wives living in Japan, Mrs. Blomhoff came to Nagasaki, only to be returned on the next available boat.
In Sadahide’s adaptation, the nurse, holding the son, is seated behind the standing woman. The woman, presumably Mrs. Blomhoff, holds a wine glass. This version is much more cheerful than the original in which Mrs. Blomhoff sits on a heavy settee, gloomily sipping her wine.