![[JAPAN] An exceptionally interesting album of cartes des visites of diplomats stationed in Japan in the early 1860s, interspersed with CDV images of Japanese life.](/sites/default/files/styles/auction_slider/public/images/lots/885/1575885.jpg?itok=fM7M1yYD)
Lot Details
Lot 96
[JAPAN] An exceptionally interesting album of cartes des visites of diplomats stationed in Japan in the early 1860s, interspersed with CDV images of Japanese life.
The collection likely assembled in Yokohama, Japan: 1862-1866. Housed in a period CDV album, leather with brass clasps. Album 5 3/4 x 4 7/8 inches (14.5 x 12 cm); with 50 CDVs in double sided mounts, many captioned on the mount in a period hand (some of the cards with pencil notations indicating subject on the rear). The majority are without any photographer's stamp and were almost certainly prepared in Japan at the time (though one, of Captain David McDougal, the commander of the U.S.S. Wyoming, bears a Manila stamp; another, with a CDV reproduction of a painting of the Wyoming's engagement with the Japanese navy, has the stamp of a New York photographer). Covers detached, lacking spine, two mounts detached from binding and the stitching dilapidated. Image tones generally very good.
Presumably assembled by someone associated with the diplomatic corps in Yokohama or Kanagawa, 18 diplomats and consular officials of various nationalities assigned to Japan are represented in this album. These include Gustave Duchesne de Bellecourt, the French Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan between 1859-1864; Maximilian August Scipio von Brandt, consul at Yokohama, 1862 on; Edward St. John Neale, Chargé d'affaires of Great Britain in Japan in 1862-1863; Captain Frederic Brine of the Royal Engineers (incidentally a correspondent of Florence Nightingale); Col. George S. Fisher, the U.S. Consul, Kanagawa (presumably laid in the album and annotated before 1866, when the Consulate there burned and removed to Yokohama) etc. The fact that all of the westerners in this album were present in Japan in the early 1860s enables a tentative date to be assigned to the collection.
There are additionally 32 CDVs of Japanese people, trades and views, including one of Tateishi Onojiro, the young samurai who was translator-in-training to the Japanese mission to Washington in 1860, nicknamed "Tommy." It should be noted that Felice Beato arrived in Yokohama in 1863, joining Charles Wirgman in founding the photographic studio of Beato & Wirgman. Few other photographers were active in Japan at this early date; Orrin Freeman, who was likely the first photographer with a studio in Japan, worked primarily in ambrotype. Beato did much work in CDV format, and it seems plausible that these are his early work. Some of the diplomatic portraits may also be by him. This album is an extraordinary evocation of the early years of the opening of Japan.
C
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