Pouring their Hearts into Photographing the Appearance of a Courtesan at Daianji, a Temple in Shimoda, in Order to Present to the American King, from the Black Ship scroll

Black Ship scroll
The Black Ship scroll depicts the second expedition by the American commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) to open Japan in 1854. After more than two centuries of near isolation, the Japanese who saw the arrival of these foreigners must have been curious and fascinated by their appearance, clothing, belongings, and technology. In addition to a map of the area around the treaty port of Shimoda and drawings of Perry’s ships and the commodore himself, the illustrations capture Perry’s crewmen and their daily activities. Compared to the detailed lithographs and drawings of this expedition made by Perry’s artist William Heine, the caricature-like drawings here are simple, and variations of the same Black Ship scroll images made by different painters attest to their mass appeal.
The illustrations shown here began life as sections of a handscroll. At some point prior to 2012, the handscroll was divided up and the sections were remounted as individual hanging scrolls., Though unidentified in this drawing, Perry’s official daguerreotypist, Eliphalet M. Brown Jr., in a blue tunic-like coat with his two assistants in yellow, prepares to photograph a young Japanese “courtesan.” Though Brown appears serious, one assistant suggestively sticks his tongue out at her as the other eagerly helps seat her. The artist depicted the woman with porcelain white skin, while the men have bushy brows and dramatic facial hair, denoting the derogatory term for Westerners ketojin, or “hairy barbarian.”