PORTRAIT OF A EUROPEAN GENTLEMAN

Japanese fascination with their foreign visitors dates to the arrival of Portuguese "black ships" in the 17th century, famously recorded by Japanese artists on richly colored paper screens. Over the following century, as Portuguese traders and religious were superseded by Dutch merchants, depictions of the Dutch in woodblock prints, paintings, lacquer and porcelain appeared. Known as the komojin, or "red-haired people", the Dutch were often shown with cartoonish curly locks and bulbous noses, carrying the clay pipes or canes that intrigued the Japanese. Anna Jackson notes that "...Dutch things (Oranda shumi)...represented the new and the exotic, something fashionable but also nonsensical." For further discussion as well as the illustration of a number of Japanese representations of the Dutch, see A. Jackson and A. Jaffer (ed.), Encounters, The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, pp. 200-207 and 212-217.