(Woman with fan) （扇子を持った女性）

Felice Beato (1832-1909) came to Japan in the late Tokugawa period, conveying important information about Japan to the societies of Europe. He photographed the city of Edo and reported on the Shimonoseki War, and made many photographs of the people and customs of Japan. Beato was born on the island of Corfu, which had once belonged to Venice and was at the time of his birth a British protectorate. When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, he traveled with his brother-in-law James Robertson (1813-1888) and younger brother Antonio Beato (1835-1906) to photograph the battlefields. In the spring or summer of 1863, Felice Beato arrived in Japan. In Japan, Beato made many landscape photographs, not just of the foreign settlement in Yokohama, and Hakone and Odawara, which were within the boundaries of the area in which foreigners were allowed to travel, but also to Edo, which was difficult for foreigners to enter. He also made photographs related to incidents of war and political trouble, traveling with the European forces to the Shimonoseki War, and in 1862 photographing the place where the Namamugi Incident occurred. During the Meiji period, Beato photographed the damage sustained by the city of Kobe after a destructive typhoon. He also set up outdoor sets on which he photographed Japanese manners and customs, and had beautiful color added by hand to prints of these scenes. He collected these prints into albums titled “Photographic Views of Japan with Historical and Descriptive Notes,” which he began selling in 1868 with great success. His brother Antonio is well known for his photograph of the Second Japanese Embassy to Europe, taken in front of the Sphinx in Egypt.