Foreign Merchants in Japanese Trade Port

Foreign Merchants in Japanese Trade Port

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Foreign Merchants in Japanese Trade PortForeign Merchants in Japanese Trade PortForeign Merchants in Japanese Trade PortForeign Merchants in Japanese Trade PortForeign Merchants in Japanese Trade Port

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.