Peoples of Different Countries [Ikoku Jinbutsu Zu]

Cloth. Leporello. Outer cloth case, with bone stays. . Very Good. With 40 watercolors depicting people from far-off places, including Spaniards, Dutch, Germans, Italians, English, Danes, Hungarians, Russians, Canadians, Armenians, Laotians, Taiwanese, Koreans, Javans, Philippinos, Siamese, Moroccans, Indians, Turks, Brazilians, Africans, etc. etc. In a slightly separate vein are painting of dwarves and of giants. The artwork is derived from, copying and augmenting, a published work by Sadahide Tutagawa, who published a work whose title translates as "Peoples of Strange Countries" around 1860. The paintings uniformly have a folk art-ish naive charm and playfulness. The dress for the European figures at least was somewhat anachronistic for the time at which this album was actually created, so we see the men and women generally in a traditional dress that harks back to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. When depicting farmers and peasants, though, this might have been less out-of-date, as these were people who clung longer to traditional dress or were more oblivious to urban fashion trends. Measuring 26 by 19 cm. Paintings accompanies by vertical captions, sometimes long, in Japanese. Condition: some fraying of the fabric on the cover. Light wear besides.