Artist: Utagawa Yoshitsuya (signed Yoshitsuya Ichieisai) (1822-1866)
Title: A Frenchwoman (Furansu fujin)
Series Title: People of the Barbarian Nations (Bankoku jinbutsu zu)
Date: 1861
Medium: Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper.
Publisher: Ebiya Rinnosuke
Engraver: Masakichi Matsushima
Inscription: “Wearing her foreign garb of spring brocade, a young woman strolls along the streets of Yokohama.” (Karagoromo haru no nishiki o mi ni soete tate Yokohama o ayumu taoyame)
Gift of Satoko Parker

This print by Yoshitsuya Utagawa, signed here as Yoshitsuya Ichieisai, is a representative example of the boom in Yokohama-e (Yokohama pictures) during the mid-nineteenth century. After the Treaty of the Five Nations was signed in 1858, the port of Yokohama became the locus of international trade in Japan. Interest in foreigners arriving on the Japanese mainland skyrocketed, and over 800 woodblock designs were issued from 1858 to 1861. Yokohama-e artists sought to appeal to their Japanese audience by emphasizing the foreignness of Western customs and costumes. To do this, artists drew from fashion plates in Western publications like the Illustrated London News and Peterson’s Magazine to create a collage of the most unusual aspects of European clothing. Attire like that of the Frenchwoman demonstrates how such secondary source material was used as design inspiration.

Prints of typified nationalities would often be sold in a set with other citizens of the five treaty nations (America, Great Britain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands). This series depicts the people of America, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy; Russia is excluded for reasons unknown.

Very few prints of this design still exist; the only other documented impression is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Selected Readings

• Foreigners in Japan; Yokohama and Related Woodcuts in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia, 1972.
• Harris, Frederick. Ukiyo-e: The Art of the Japanese Print. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2010.
• Meech-Pekarik, Julia. The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization. New York: Weatherhill, 1986.
• Yonemura, Ann. Yokohama: Prints from Nineteenth-century Japan. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1990.

Posted by Jamie Vaught
April 19, 2016