Images of dutchness : popular visual culture, early cinema, and the emergence of a national cliché, 1800-1914

Abstract

This colour woodblock print was produced by Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814) in Japan (Fig. I.1). The print is designed according to the laws of the central perspective and shows a city or town. On the canal or river in the foreground, figures sit in a rowboat; some of them fish while others take a bath in the seemingly shallow water. Stairs lead from the banks of the river or canal to the streets of the city. The landscape is hilly; the brick-built houses and towers are situated on the hill slopes; trees and bushes grow between the houses. Some towers have fans attached to them. The print’s title is Scene of a Canal in Holland. While this image is not likely to trigger associations with the Netherlands among twentieth- and twenty-first-century viewers, according to Stephen Little (1996), it was perceived as a realistic documentation by Japanese viewers at the time it was produced. It takes some effort to understand how it was possible that this print was perceived as a realistic image of the Netherlands and the Dutch. Little offers an explanation by describing the historical period in which this print was produced. At that time, Japan underwent a period of isolation; hardly anyone could enter or leave the country, and international trade was very restricted. The Dutch were the only Western power that was allowed limited trade with Japan, which included Dutch books on Western sciences, among them books on optical laws as well as perspective prints. These goods became accessible to a small number of Japanese scholars and artists. The craft of woodblock printing was already well-known in Japan; inspired by the foreign composition principle of the central perspective, some artists produced Japanese-style perspective prints between 1740 and the mid nineteenth century (Cf. Little 1996, 74–76). Little continues: One of the rarest prints in the Art Institute’s collection is Toyoharu’s Scene of a Canal in Holland, which can be dated to the 1770s. The precise source of this strange image is unknown. That figures are swimming in the canal, however, suggests a degree of artistic license which is fully characteristic of prints of foreign lands, since the Japanese assumed (wrongly) that the Dutch went swimming in their canals. Toyoharu created a number of views of Europe, as well as imaginary views of China. Japanese print designers often mixed European and Chinese architectural styles, as Toyoharu did here. Since both were exotic – indeed virtually unknowable to the average Japanese – their combination would not have been recognized as incongruous. Such prints claimed to present real views of real places far from Japan, and their claims were accepted. (Little 1996, 84)