Stop 8 - Dutchman

Anonymous Nagasaki School, Dutchman, early 19th c, ink and colour on paper, 53.4 x 17.9cm, Stokes Collection, Perth, 2013.164

This drawing was produced by a Japanese artist in Nagasaki in the early nineteenth century and is testament to local curiosity about foreigners. The German inscription describes the figure as a “Dutchman in court dress”. Great care has been taken to portray his costume, from the extravagant feathers on his hat to the jade hilt of his dagger, which may well have come from India.

The Dutchman would have worked in the Japanese base of the Dutch East India Company on the artificial island of Dejima in the harbour of Nagasaki. A self-sufficient trading base with warehouses, living quarters and small gardens, Dejima was cut off from mainland Japan and little or no interchange between its inhabitants and the local population was allowed.

Following the expulsion of all other Westerners from Japan in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company had a trade monopoly with the country that lasted until its re-opening in the mid-nineteenth century. Japan's isolation policy had in part been prompted by the increasing influence of Jesuit missionaries from Southern Europe. In order to prove their purely commercial (rather than cultural or religious) interests, the Dutch were regularly required to perform an “efumi” ceremony, in which they had to step on specially produced images of the Virgin Mary and Christ. This was unproblematic for the Calvinist Dutch, who rejected the use of religious images, but would have been unthinkable for Catholics, who had previously attempted to introduce Christianity to Japan.

At least once every four years, a Company delegation would leave Dejima to travel to the court in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay tribute to the shogun with lavish presents and the assurance of loyalty through efumi. As part of their visit, the merchants were also required to perform their exotic Western identity to their Japanese hosts. A surgeon in the employ of the Company described his embarrassment at having to enact: “countless monkey games, such as how Hollanders salute each other, dance, jump, play the drunkard, speak broken Japanese, read Dutch, paint, sing and take off and put on their cloaks.”

Dutchman Painting


ARC Centre of Excellence
for the History of Emotions