Foreign Merchants in Japanese Trade Port
Not on view
Things foreign enjoyed great popularity in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Japan, and a number of genre paintings in the screen format were devoted to the curiosity and artistic interest aroused by the presence of Portuguese and Spanish traders at port. The exotic costumes of Jesuit priests, Christian icons, strange animals, and oddities like clocks and guns all found their way into Japanese painting. These diminutive screens, created later in the Edo period, are a pastiche of earlier Nanban (“Southern Barbarian”) scenes, and shows the foreign traders who imported rare birds. They reprise the genre at a time when foreign presence in Japan was once again a major impact on Japanese culture after a long period of limited international relations.
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