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Lot Essay
An example of this print in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is described as follows:
A rare view of a foreign shop interior by Sadahide includes a kitchen crowded with servants. A hairy Western butcher cuts a side of beef to order, a Japanese cook is busy at the stove, and a Black man wrings the neck of a duck. The Black laundress squatting in the foreground is the only figure singled out for special notice with a label; she was a type that espcially intrigued this artist. Sadahide treats Black servants with considerable dignity; most Japanese, being intensely ethnocentric, rejected all races except for themselves and the Whites. The racial separation observed by the 1860 embassy to America on the eve of the Civil War, and in the streets of Yokohama, was accepted as a simple fact. Blacks were related to the Japanese pariah class, or eta.
In the shop on the right a Chinese merchant holding a bolt of red fabric observes with amusement as the Western shopkeepers haggle in sign language with perplexed Japanese customers. An anchor (in the center foreground), some books, and a large framed picture of an elephant are offered for sale. (Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization [New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1986], p. 30 and pl. 7).
A rare view of a foreign shop interior by Sadahide includes a kitchen crowded with servants. A hairy Western butcher cuts a side of beef to order, a Japanese cook is busy at the stove, and a Black man wrings the neck of a duck. The Black laundress squatting in the foreground is the only figure singled out for special notice with a label; she was a type that espcially intrigued this artist. Sadahide treats Black servants with considerable dignity; most Japanese, being intensely ethnocentric, rejected all races except for themselves and the Whites. The racial separation observed by the 1860 embassy to America on the eve of the Civil War, and in the streets of Yokohama, was accepted as a simple fact. Blacks were related to the Japanese pariah class, or eta.
In the shop on the right a Chinese merchant holding a bolt of red fabric observes with amusement as the Western shopkeepers haggle in sign language with perplexed Japanese customers. An anchor (in the center foreground), some books, and a large framed picture of an elephant are offered for sale. (Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization [New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1986], p. 30 and pl. 7).