Foreign Business Establishment in Yokohama (Yokohama ijin shōkan uriba no zu)9th month, 1861
Merchants and customers crowd the sales room of a foreign trading house in Yokohama, a scene full of unfamiliar goods, costumes and faces. More about this work
About this work
Merchants and customers crowd the sales room of a foreign trading house in Yokohama, a scene full of unfamiliar goods, costumes and faces. After the port opened to Western trade in 1859, prints known as Yokohama-e satisfied enormous public curiosity about the newcomers, and Utagawa Sadahide was the most prolific and inventive of their designers. Spread across three sheets, this view mixes close observation with imagination, made at a time when most Japanese who saw it had never met a foreigner.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Triptych
- Three sheets designed to sit side by side and read as one wide picture.
Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide
Japanese, 1807–1873
Sadahide trained under Utagawa Kunisada and became the leading designer of Yokohama-e, pictures of foreigners and their customs made after the port of Yokohama opened to Western trade in 1859. He depicted the merchants, ships and houses of the foreign settlement in close detail, and also produced wide panoramic views and illustrated books. The fashion for such pictures peaked in 1860–61, when curiosity about the newcomers was at its height.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 2007.49.130a–c
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Prints
- Department
- Asian Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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