Japan’s arts and crafts first became widely collected in the West during the nineteenth century and simultaneously exerted influence on artists, crafts makers, and designers in diverse fields. This initial wave of interest increased significantly after the Americans forcibly opened the country to international trade in 1854, and continued to impact attitudes towards Japanese design through the early post-World War II years. The striking designs on Japanese arts, with imagery of the natural world or featuring vignettes from everyday life, were widely lauded for their abstract, asymmetrical and dynamic compositions, and bold color palette, as well as their fine craftsmanship and sensitivity to the use of raw materials. These arts inspired the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, and facilitated creation of a broad new aesthetic inspired by Japan-derived design, known by the French term Japonisme. Writers, both Western admirers and Japanese nationals, played a pivotal role in promoting Japan and its arts. Some considered linkages between Asian/Buddhist spirituality and aesthetics as paramount. Others emphasized the novel designs of Japanese arts, which became catalysts for new ideas about principles of modern design that eschewed references to rigid historical styles. At the same time, Japanese writers familiar with Western appreciation of their art forms began to promote their country’s arts in the West to help their nation better define its cultural identity in the global arena.

The Western individuals who served as arbiters of taste for Japan’s aesthetics and design during this formative period gained their newfound knowledge via various routes. Some had journeyed to Japan to work for the Japanese government as technical experts or professors at newly founded universities, as adventurers or entrepreneurs, or in the service of foreign governments or foreign trading companies. Others simply went as tourists, for stays often of several months’ duration, to see the sites and collect Japanese art at the source. The tales, images, and objects they brought back fueled the interests of those at home, whose own exposure to the culture derived from the widespread availability of Japanese arts at a multitude of venues in their respective countries. Phillip Franz von Siebold (see p. 124 below), in Japan in the 1820s and whose writings on Japan date from the 1830s, was the first influential Western writer and collector.

Plate 3-1 View of the west court entrance to the Japanese art exhibition in the Palace of Fine Arts at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, in 1893. Photo source: William Walton, World’s Columbian Exposition 1893: Art and Architecture, Edition of the Republic, (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1893), vol. 11, p. 105, collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Several decades after Siebold’s return, a public display at the 1862 London International Exposition of the Japanese arts collection amassed in Japan by Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809–1897), greatly stimulated fascination with the country’s arts in Europe. Alcock, who served in Japan from 1859 as Britain’s first official minister and who later, in 1878, authored a book about Japanese arts, was one of several Englishmen to write on the subject in the 1870s and early 1880s.1 Two others, Thomas W. Cutler (d. 1909) and George Ashdown Audsley (1838–1925), were both architects who each published deluxe limited edition volumes about Japanese fine and decorative arts aimed at discerning collectors.² Cutler’s book, A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design (1880), featured short introductions and many illustrations to Japan’s varied arts, arranged by media. He apparently labored over the manuscript for eighteen years. It was intended to update, with emphasis on Japanese design, the influential landmark publication, A Grammar of Ornament (1856), by another British architect, Owen Jones (1809–1874), one of the great reformers of the British design movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Audsley’s book, The Ornamental Arts of Japan (1882), covered much of the same material as Cutler’s, with some additional categories of decorative arts (paintings, textiles, embroidery, lacquers, cloisonné enamels, encrusted work, metalwork, carved and terracotta modeled sculpture, and heraldry) featured in gorgeous full page color plates. Both were highly personal accounts that were based on second-hand sources, not scholarly texts, and both were lavishly illustrated.³ The detailed factual information included in these and other books of this period was transmitted to the authors from Japanese advisers, chief of whom were Hayashi Tadamasa (1851–1906) and Wakai Kenzaburo (d. 1908), who both came to Paris for the 1878 Exposition Universelle as staff of the Japanese government’s art exporting company, and who stayed on afterwards as private art dealers.

Plate 3-2 Section of a silk brocade. Described as probably woven in Kyoto in the early 18^th century and used as an obi. Photo source: George Ashdown Audsley, The Ornamental Arts of Japan (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882), collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, Section Third, plate XI. Textiles were among the most popular of all Japanese arts among early Western collectors, who marveled at their designs and complex production techniques. This example from Audsley’s book was one of many owned by the Parisian collector/dealer Siegfred Bing (see p. 122).

Japanese government-sponsored displays and sales galleries in the halls of the international expositions were among the most popular places where the public could see Japanese arts. These had begun with the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, where the samurai lord of the Satsuma domain, not the central government, had sponsored the exhibition of Japanese materials. Among the many fairs in which the Japanese later participated, undoubtedly it was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that became a watershed moment for the Japanese because, for the first time, the Japanese government had received permission to display art by the country’s pre-eminent artists in the Palace of Fine Arts, not in the building designated for displays of industrial arts, an honor accorded to no other non-Western nation.⁴

Concurrent with the expositions, both Japanese and foreign entrepreneurs began to open privately run commercial establishments to sell Japanese arts and crafts in major cities across Europe and the United States. Exhibitions of Japanese arts and crafts at esteemed European and American art museums soon followed, organized by both foreign and Japanese curators. Interest in educating the public about design was, in fact, the early mission of major art museums in the West, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. These museums sought to collect art that served as models for artists and designers, and Japanese arts, highly admired for their novel and arresting designs, were collected by museums for this purpose. At first these museums showcased objects, including loans, gifts and bequests from private individuals, as well as from museum purchases, but in the 1930s, as cultural diplomacy before the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese government sponsored three major exhibitions of Japanese National Treasures abroad, at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (1936, in celebration of the Tercentenary Celebration of Harvard University), at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (1939), and at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939).⁵ These landmark exhibitions were all organized by the influential Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka ShinkMkai or KBS), a semi-independent agency that received money from the Japanese Foreign Ministry.⁶

This chapter describes twenty-eight individuals and the influential texts they authored, which introduced the West to Japanese aesthetic and design principles from the 1830s to the 1950s. Writings of the early post-war period are included here because many writers active in the early part of the twentieth century continued to publish until then. The biographies of these individuals are presented within groupings defined by their professions or fields of expertise to provide a sense of how their perceptions about what aspects of Japanese design they considered the most significant were influenced by their professional training. Within these categories, the biographies are presented chronologically according to their year of birth. This admittedly subjective selection represents an attempt to identify those whose writings were broadest and most influential in their own day. Some of the names will be familiar and others may not. My selection omits authors whose impact was limited because of the nature of their publications (such as the early writers discussed above who authored only expensive limited edition publications), who did not hold themselves out as experts and produced only brief articles and reviews in popular magazines or newspapers, who penned mainly narrowly focused studies on particular art forms or individual artists, exhibition, private collection, or museum collection catalogues, and official Japanese government publications (on Japanese arts exhibited at international expositions abroad). I also omit art dealers and collectors who did not themselves write about their passion for Japanese art, although these people are mentioned within the context of writers with whom they associated.

Plate 3-3 Vantine’s Curio Room, New York. Postcard, featuring a variety of Japanese wares for sale, ca. 1900. A. A. Vantine & Co., one of the most successful mercantile establishments to sell imported Japanese goods, had its main showroom at 5^th Avenue and 39^th Street in New York City. The company was founded around 1866 and remained in business through the 1920s. It billed itself as “the most interesting store in the world ... an ever-changing exposition of antique and modern works of art from each nook and corner of Japan, China, Turkey, Persia, India, and the Holy Land.”

For a significant number of the men surveyed below, their engagement with Japan took place in multiple dimensions as a consequence of or ancillary to their professional lives. Many of these individuals knew each other or their writings, and they frequently developed their ideas within overlapping social networks. However, although collectively they admired similar types of arts, their writings reflect their personal interests, agendas, and viewpoints, and resulted in a plurality of perspectives on Japanese culture and its arts. Generally, although these early writers sought to explain the distinctive qualities of Japanese aesthetics and design in relation to Japan’s culture, often emphasizing its religious beliefs, they also compared Japanese arts, sometimes naively, to products made in the West. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm, sincerity, studiousness, and the insights gleaned from their obvious delight in the art to which they had access merit our attention.

ARTISTS AND ART PROFESSORS

John La Farge (American, 1835–1910)
Born in New York City to French parents and raised bilingually, La Farge was one of the earliest and most influential American artists to introduce Japanese design and aesthetics to the West through his writings and lectures, and through its influences on his own art, including painting, murals, and stained glass. He probably became aware of Japanese art while living in Paris in 1856 with a cousin, whose friends included Philippe Burty (p. 140) and Theodore Duret (p. 141). There, he made his first purchase of Japanese art, an illustrated woodblock book by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). La Farge is distinguished for authoring the first published essay on Japanese art by a Western painter, in 1870.⁷ In it he interspersed his own observations on the distinctive design qualities of Japanese art with those of earlier writers, emphasizing four important characteristics: a bird’s eye perspective for defining depth, love of caricature, compositions emphasizing asymmetrical “occult balance,” and harmonious and natural use of colors.⁸ Most importantly, he recognized that the genius of Japanese artists as designers lay in their successful blending of two opposite aesthetics of abstraction and realism.⁹ La Farge collected and read Western language books about Japan, among them Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward Sylvester Morse (p. 125), in preparation for a trip to Japan in 1886 with his friend, the distinguished writer Henry Adams (1838–1918). Adams and La Farge traveled to Japan “as seekers of nirvana”¹⁰ (Buddhism’s escape from reincarnation), though more practically, La Farge sought inspiration for a church mural commission back home. They had as guides the two most famous Bostonian Buddhists, Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) and collector Dr William Sturgis Bigelow (1850– 1926), cousin to Adam’s wife. While there, La Farge also met Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136), who tutored him in Chinese spiritual philosophies of Daoism and Confucianism.¹¹ The trip also turned La Farge into an avid collector of many types of Japanese arts, including books of designs for fans, stencils (katagami), textile fragments, ceramics, lacquers, woodblock prints, sword guards, and Buddhist paintings. La Farge later reflected on his lifelong attraction to Japanese art in his 1890 book, An Artist’s Letters from Japan.¹²

Plate 3-4 John La Farge (1835– 1910), Portrait of Our Landlord, the Buddhist Priest Zenshin San, at the Door of the Clergy House, Iyemitsu Temple, Nikko, 1886. Watercolor and gouache over graphite on off-white woven paper, 22.4 x 25.1 cm. Collection of Bill and Libby Clark. La Farge sketched and painted many watercolors during his stay in Japan.

Plate 3-5 Attributed to Kubota Beisen (1852–1906), Patrol in China, 1894–1895. Original drawing, ink and watercolor on paper, sheet 24.1 x 33 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Lowenhaupt, 867:2010. Kubota Beisen, whom Frank Brinkley (p. 132) also admired, was a Kyoto native who moved to Tokyo to work as a journalist-illustrator for a popular newspaper, which sent him to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) front, from which he produced illustrated stories of the battles. His sketches, such as this one, served as models for wood-block prints inserted into the newspaper. Beisen’s mastery of sketching from nature is evident in this drawing.

Henry Pike Bowie (American, 1847–1920)
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in San Francisco, Bowie graduated from university there and then embarked on a grand European tour before returning to San Francisco to apprentice as a lawyer. He first visited Japan briefly in 1893 on a world tour, financed by an inheritance from his late wife. Instantly enchanted, he returned the following year for a lengthier stay. Scholarly and modest by nature, he first set out to master the language, spoken and written, then proceeded to study traditional painting himself because he considered the art as key to understanding the culture.¹³ Settling first in Kyoto where he met his mentor, painter Kubota Beisen (1852–1906), who specialized in traditional Japanese-style painting (Nihonga), he later moved to Tokyo. Bowie met with and studied from many of the leading painters of his day, but he held such high admiration for Beisen that on the first page of his seminal book, On the Laws of Japanese Painting,¹⁴ he wrote:

Dedicated to the memory of Kubota Beisen a great artist and kindly man whose happiness was in helping others and whose triumphant career has shed enduring luster upon the art of Japanese painting.

Subsequent appreciation of Beisen has been overshadowed, however, by that of other Nihonga artists from Tokyo whom the more celebrated scholars Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) and Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136) avidly promoted. Bowie did not approve of Fenollosa, who never studied painting himself, and disagreed with the latter’s insistence that Japanese painters should adapt their styles to sell works abroad. Bowie’s erudite, succinct, and highly personal book reveals his deep affection for Japanese painting. Although it provides a short history of painting, the book emphasized techniques: use of the brush and ink, and names for various types of brush strokes; painting materials; methods of applying color; principles of proportion, shape, and design; the importance of seasonally appropriate allusions; common subjects; aesthetic principles beginning with the importance of capturing the spirit of the subject portrayed; and application of seals and signatures.

Plate 3-6 Unknown Artist, active Edo period, Kan’ei era (1624–1644) to Keian era (1648-1652), Dancing Courtesan. One from a set of eleven panels, ink and color on gold leafed paper, 75.3 x 37.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection, 17.1091. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2013.

Denman Waldo Ross (America, 1853–1935)
A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Ross moved to Boston at age eight and through family connections mingled with intellectual and élite members of Boston society. He earned an undergraduate degree and then a doctorate in political economy at Harvard in 1875. From a young age he had shown interest in painting to which he only turned after graduation. Around 1889, he began a long career as a professor of design and art theory at Harvard University, in the same department that Langdon Warner (p. 144) joined later. Following a family tradition, Ross served from 1895 as a Museum of Fine Arts Boston trustee and amassed a vast collection of a wide variety of arts from various world cultures, including Japan, which he donated to the Museum of Fine Arts. His interest in Japan came from diverse sources, including the writings of art historian James Jackson Jarves (p. 139) and several illustrious collectors who were his acquaintances: Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924). Unlike Jarves, who never visited Japan, Ross made three trips, in 1908, 1910, and 1912. He developed his ideas about design education and theory in conjunction with two close compatriots, Arthur Wesley Dow (p. 121) and Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), and presented them in an influential book, A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm, With Illustrations and Diagrams (1907), aimed at aspiring artists.¹⁵ The book offers principles of design rather than design history. In his conclusion, Ross explained that the study of design was important “to induce in ourselves the art-living and art-producing faculties. With these faculties we shall be able to discover Order and Beauty everywhere, and life will be happier and better worth living.”¹⁶ Convinced that design concepts inherent in the Japanese arts could serve as models, he wrote about the Japanese emphasis on asymmetrical compositional balance (“occult balance,” the same term that La Farge used) and commented on the Japanese propensity for technical perfection.¹⁷ This led him to caution his students to pay attention to how techniques depended on an understanding of the materials they used.

Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857–1922)
The foremost art educator of his time, from Ipswich, near Boston, Dow became intrigued with the landscape prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) while studying art in Paris from 1884 to 1889. Inspired by their work, he began experimenting with woodblock printing in the early 1890s, becoming the first American artist to perfect the technique. His prints were first exhibited in 1895 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Their clear flat patterns and compositions revealed obvious Japanese influences, as noted by art critic Sadakichi Hartmann (p. 142) in his 1902 book on American art. Dow also became fascinated with the potential for Japanese stencils to assist in improving the composition and technique of his own and his students’ work. In Boston, he had the opportunity to study the largest collection of stencils amassed in the West in the 1880s by William Sturgis Bigelow, whose prints were stored at, and later donated to, the Museum of Fine Arts.¹⁸ Langdon Warner (p. 144) organized an exhibition of Bigelow’s stencils in 1910. Later in life, Dow collected stencils himself.¹⁹ Dow’s own association with the Museum of Fine Arts began in 1891 when he met Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), who was then working there as a curator, and for several years, beginning in 1893, Dow served as Fenollosa’s assistant. Through Fenollosa, Dow also came to know Denman Ross (p. 120). Dow spent an extended period in Chicago, from 1899 to 1901, where he lectured on his design theories, contributed to art journals, and exhibited his prints at the Art Institute, influencing the young Frank Lloyd Wright (p. 130).²⁰ In 1895, he moved to New York City where he lived and taught art for the duration of his career. Despite his obvious love for Japanese art, Dow only traveled to Japan once, a three-month stay in 1903 during a round the world voyage. As an educator, Dow encouraged numerous students to adopt Japanese design principles in their art. He first wrote about these in an article in 1893, explaining why he considered Japanese art such an important model for American artists.²¹ His article began with the statement: “Japanese art is the expression of a people’s devotion to the beautiful,” and concluded by noting that “all Japanese artists are designers.” Dow cautioned that “[t]he American artist is in danger of sacrificing composition to realism; he, therefore, needs the stimulus of these matchless works of Eastern genius to draw out his inventive and creative powers.”²² He identified three characteristics of Japanese art that aspiring artists should emulate: line, color (“not limited by scientific laws”), and nōtan (literally “dark–light”), that he described as “not light and shadow, but an eternal principle of art, and the Japanese compose in it with matchless daring united to an unerring sense of the beautiful.”²³ As already mentioned in connection with the discussion of nōtan on pages 44-5, it was Fenollosa, perhaps as early as the mid-1880s, who coined this expression.²⁴ Dow based his conception of this design principle in large part on his appreciation of Japanese stencils.

Plate 3-7 Attributed to Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), Bird on a Persimmon Branch, early 20^th century. Stencil (katagami), cut mulberry bark paper, 22.86 x 27.3 cm. Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Museum purchase: Lucy Shaw Schultz Fund, 2002.0003. The Japanese influence in this stencil is evident in the asymmetrical composition, delicate rendering of a close-up view of the natural world, and the clear, flat, dark–light patterning of the forms. The piece was once in Dow’s personal collection, and although it was originally thought to be an actual Japanese stencil, scholars have recently deduced Dow himself created it.

ART DEALERS

Siegfred Bing (German, naturalized French, 1838–1905)
Bing was a wealthy Parisian art dealer and seminal figure in the art world of his day who spearheaded efforts to popularize Japonisme. His gallery, La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, established in the mid-1870s, gave its name to the Art Nouveau movement.25 Bing also had a large private collection of Japanese ukiyoe prints and crafts, including textiles and ceramics, sold off after his death (his textiles were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1896). Above all, he is known for fervently promoting Japanese arts through the magazine he founded and edited, Le Japon Artistique (Artistic Japan; published in 36 issues between 1888 and 1891 in French, German, and English editions), the first ever popular monthly art magazine. He intended this journal as a forum for educating the European and American art collecting public about Japanese art, aesthetics, and culture, emphasizing its beauty and creativity, and providing ideas for Western designers. Although he routinely included examples of Japanese art from his vast collection in its pages and authored a few of the articles himself, he cast his net widely for authors and topics to address what encompassed Japan’s literary and dramatic arts so as to broaden his readership and place understanding of Japanese arts within a larger cultural context. Many European Japanophile luminaries of his day wrote articles for this journal, including British art dealer Marcus Huish (p. 123), Philippe Burty (p. 140), Theodore Duret (p. 141), Louis Gonse (p. 142), and Dr William Anderson (1842–1900), the foremost British collector of Japanese prints and paintings, thereby giving it an air of authority. To translate the journal into English, Bing engaged Huish. All the articles stressed the exquisite beauty of Japanese crafts, especially workmanship in small-scale objects in various media, such as wood, metals, engraving, and lacquer. Unrelated to the articles, most featured examples of Japanese cut paper stencil patterns (katagami) used for creating designs on textiles, which fostered the widespread appreciation and collecting of these materials.”²⁶

Plate 3-8 Paper Stencil (katagami) with design of scattered hollyhock leaves, 19^th century. Mulberry bark paper and silk threads. Saint Louis Art Museum. Gift of V. W. von Hagen, 236:1931.

Plate 3-9 After Hokusai, Master of the Old School. Photo source: Marcus Bourne Huish, Japan and Its Art (London: B. T. Batsford, third edition, 1912), preface p. v. Although Huish featured many artists and different types of artworks in his Japan and Its Art, like Bing’s Artistic Japan, he interspersed its pages with charming sketches like this one based on those of everyone’s favorite Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai.

Marcus Huish (British, 1843–1921)
Huish trained as a lawyer at Trinity College, Cambridge, but worked professionally as an art dealer, watercolorist, publisher, and writer. He also served as director of the Fine Art Society, a well respected art firm that reproduced paintings, organized art exhibitions, and sponsored publications.27 He also collected Japanese art (and wrote about collecting in the journal Artistic Japan). Although he never traveled to Japan, Huish amassed considerable knowledge about Japanese art and its culture, and edited and authored a number of significant publications. Editing projects included the Art Journal, to which he also contributed essays on Japanese art that he eventually published in book form; the English language edition of the journal Artistic Japan published by Siegfred Bing (p. 122); Transactions of the Japan Society, an organization which he helped found in 1891 and for which he served as chairman; and the English edition of Count Okuma Shigenobu’s Fifty Years of New Japan (Kaikoku gojūnen shi, 1909). His book, Japan and Its Art, first published in 1889, was aimed “more for the dilettante than the student,”²⁸ and can be considered a summation of the prevailing attitudes towards Japanese art and culture of his era. In the expanded third edition (published in 1912), he devoted the first 184 pages to discussions of various aspects of Japanese culture that facilitated understanding of the subjects represented in art and the motivations of artists. In his prologue to that edition, he stated the book’s aim was first to give “an idea of the physical aspect of Japan, its history, religion, people, and their mode of living, myths and legends as illustrated in Art. Then, secondly, [to function as] a treatise on its arts, especially those which we term ‘industrial’.”²⁹ His observations echoed those of other authors of his time, for example, how poetical sentiments of nature permeated all classes. His chapters covered painting, prints, sculpture in wood and ivory, lacquer, metalwork, pottery and porcelain, and embroideries and textiles (including two examples of stencil plates that he owned). This last section, he noted, was one of the chapters new to the third edition, because he especially wanted to feature significant types of manufacturing of arts of his own time.

Plate 3-10 Kawahara Keiga (1786–ca. 1860), Artist’s Studio, from the Four Accomplishments series. Hanging scroll, color on silk, 52.4 x 88.2 cm. National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Siebold Collection, No. 1–1039. Keiga served as an official painter to the Dutch residents of Nagasaki and in that capacity painted scenes of daily life and customs in Japan as requested by von Siebold. Here, he has portrayed a painter’s studio, a lovely Japanese room adjacent to a garden, with the master at the center putting finishing touches to a painting laid out on a red cloth mat to protect the tatami, surrounded by his brushes, ink, and other tools of the trade, while, within his view, his apprentices put finishing touches on additional paintings.

SCIENTISTS AND PHYSICIANS

Phillip Franz von Siebold (German, 1796–1866)
A physician, Siebold worked in Japan as a medical doctor for the Dutch East India Company from 1823 to 1829, when he was expelled because of alleged espionage with the Russians. A methodical and studious observer, while in Japan Siebold had amassed a collection of botanical specimens and over 5,000 Japanese objects, including a variety of household goods, crafts, tools, ukiyoe prints (including many books and single sheet prints by Hokusai), and paintings, with the aim of furthering understanding of the Japanese people.30 In the early 1830s, Siebold opened his house in Leiden to the public, to make his collections accessible to people. They became the core of a new ethnographic museum in that city, now the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology (Museum Volkenkunde), which was the first such institution in Europe. Siebold was later pardoned and granted permission to return to Japan, which he did in 1859 and 1861, when he served as advisor to the shogun on how to introduce Western science to the country. His collection was legendary; the French art critic Louis Gonse (p. 142) wrote in his book, L’Art Japonais (1883), of his visit to see Siebold’s vast painting collection,³¹ and other prominent early French writers on Japanese art also made pilgrimages to Leiden to see his collection. Siebold tirelessly promoted greater understanding of Japanese people and culture, and for that Europeans consider him the father of Japanese studies in the West. Although he did not comment on aesthetics and design per se, he was obviously a keen admirer of Japanese craftsmanship and its architecture. His legacy includes, in addition to his vast collections, numerous publications, the most important of which is the monumental multi-volume tome, Nippon, written in German, published privately and by subscription beginning in 1832, and republished many times over the decades, first in an expanded complete form by his sons in 1897.³² This book has been described as an insider’s account of the land and people of Japan, and featured well ordered assessments of Japanese religious traditions, the arts, history, agriculture, industry, science, and the country’s natural environment. Siebold’s influence in the English speaking world was limited, however, to an 1841 anonymously edited British volume, Manners and Customs of the Japanese, in the Nineteenth Century, that drew heavily on his writings.

Edward Sylvester Morse (American, 1838–1925)
A brilliant Harvard-trained zoologist, Morse had a passion for a type of marine shellfish known as brachiopods. Upon learning they existed in the waters off Japan, he traveled there in 1877, a chance encounter that led to his lifelong fascination with Japanese culture. Morse conducted the first ever archaeological excavation in Japan at shell mounds near Tokyo, which led to his nearly three-year appointment to teach zoology at the recently established Tokyo Imperial University. From 1880 to 1914 Morse served as director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Salem, during which time he returned to Japan for briefer visits, in 1881 and 1882, when he collected numerous household objects and crafts for the museum. On his last trip, he served as guide for his friend, collector William Sturgis Bigelow, journeying to Japan for the first time. He also mentored Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) and Percival Lowell (p. 126). Morse’s scientific mind informed his appreciation of Japanese arts. He became an avid and systematic collector of a variety of Japanese crafts and household objects, including ceramics that he sold to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1889, the year before he was appointed Keeper of Pottery at that museum. Morse, in part, owed the acquisition to Denman Waldo Ross (p. 120), who argued for its approval in his role as museum trustee, stating that “the collection [of 5,000 pieces] illustrates, better than any collection of works of art which I have ever seen, the principle which underlies all true artistic activity—the principle that it is not enough to invent new types of things, but each type must be improved and perfected according to the ideal which it suggests to the imagination.”³³ Morse’s writings include Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1885), which he dedicated to William Sturgis Bigelow; Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery (1900),³⁴ and Japan Day by Day (1917),³⁵ the latter a compilation of the meticulous journals he kept while in Japan. Although a scientist, his books reveal his belief that the Japanese people’s lifestyle and work ethic contributed to the culture’s aesthetic sensibility. For example, in describing the displays at an industrial exhibition Morse attended in Ueno Park in Tokyo, he wrote of his awe of Japanese designs and use of material, stating that “no words can describe the grace, finish, and purity of design; these and other exquisite productions of the Japanese show their great love of nature and their power to embody these simple motifs in decorative art, and after seeing these it seems as if the Japanese were the greatest lovers of nature and the greatest artists in the world.”³⁶

Plate 3-11 Sumi-tsubo (carpenter’s ink pot), 19^th century. Wood, iron, silk cord, and ivory, length 26 cm, height 10 cm. Private collection, Japan. In his book Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, Morse wrote not only about the appearance of Japanese buildings and their construction methods, but also about the tools used by carpenters, whom he ranked higher than their Western counterparts for their workmanship, patience, and creativity. He pointed out the importance of the sumi-tsubo (an inkpot and reel, alongside of which is a cavity filled with ink-soaked cotton fibers) that the carpenters hand-carved themselves, which he illustrated in a fine line drawing, and remarked that they were more precise than Western carpenters’ chalk lines.

Plate 3-12 Lower garden at Saihōji (Kokkedera, or Moss Temple), Arashiyama, Kyoto. Restored in 1339 by Zen priest Musō Soseki (1275–1351). Photograph © sdstockphoto/istockphoto.com. This Zen temple garden is widely acknowledged as the quintessential Japanese moss garden, whose atmosphere is permeated with an air of Buddhist mystery known as yūgen. The pond around which the garden is organized is a vestige of an earlier incarnation as a garden that visualized the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amida, central to Pure Land Buddhist beliefs.

Percival Lowell (American, 1855–1916)
Born into a prominent Boston family, Lowell is best remembered as the astronomer and mathematician who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Prior to embarking on that profession, however, he had such deep passion for Japan that he traveled there for prolonged visits between 1883 and 1893, often in the company of his cousin William Sturgis Bigelow. He also was mentored by Edward Sylvester Morse (p. 125). Lowell, an intrepid adventurer and gifted linguist who quickly attained some competency in Japanese, is considered the first American to sympathetically attempt to understand and explain the Japanese people and their culture. Among his books are Occult Japan, or, The Way of the Gods (1895)³⁷ and The Soul of the Far East, (1888),³⁸ a modest-sized but perceptive reflection on how Asian and Japanese religious traditions fostered a spiritual world view that encouraged imagination and intuitive appreciation of art. Therein he commented:

Artistic perception is with him an instinct to which he intuitively conforms, and for which he inherits the skill of countless generations. From the tips of his fingers to the tips of his toes, in whose use he is surprisingly proficient, he is the artist all over. Admirable, however, as is his manual dexterity, his mental altitude is still more to be admired; for it is artistic to perfection. His perception of beauty is as keen as his comprehension of the cosmos is crude; for while with science he has not even a speaking acquaintance, with art he is on terms of the most affectionate intimacy.³⁹

Elsewhere in the book he observed the Japanese passion for nature, stating that

This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts for natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself.⁴⁰

He also commented on the poetic qualities of Japanese painting and perceptively noted that nature, not man, is the artist’s ideal source of inspiration. These ideas gained wide currency later among writers about Japanese aesthetics and design, including Lafcadio Hearn (p. 133), and also Imagist poets inspired by Asian spirituality, including Lowell’s sister Amy Lowell (1874–1925) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972).

INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS AND ARCHITECTS

Christopher Dresser (Scottish, 1834–1904)
Dresser pioneered the field of industrial design with well-designed, functional, machine-made products for wide distribution. He was also a botanist, prolific writer, lecturer, and inveterate collector of Japanese crafts and household goods. Dresser trained as a designer at London’s new Government School of Design, established to spearhead reform in the field of design through joint study of art and science. There, Dresser concurrently researched and published on botany. His education included the study of Japanese design through examples of artifacts collected by the school’s affiliate arts institution, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum).41 One of his mentors at the school was the previously mentioned architect Owen Jones, to whose book, The Grammar of Ornament, he contributed a botanical drawing. Upon graduation, Dresser lectured and wrote about botanical subjects as appropriate ornamentation for the “Arts-and-Manufacture” industries, with particular reference to Japanese arts.⁴² Dresser, who visited and published articles about the major European and American international expositions, developed an even keener interest in Japan when he attended the 1862 International Exposition in London and saw Sir Rutherford Alcock’s collection. Following a visit to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, he visited Japan for over three months to present examples of British industrial arts as gifts to the Tokyo Imperial Museum, to counsel the Japanese on ways to improve the international marketability of their crafts industries, and to acquire Japanese art for his own collection and for the Tiffany Co., whose collection was known by, and perhaps influenced, John La Farge (p. 118), Edward Sylvester Morse (p. 125), and Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134). Because of connections he had made with Japanese officials who had previously visited London, he was permitted to travel widely and allowed access to imperial art collections off limits to ordinary visitors. His book that followed this trip, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882), was a travelogue in which he analytically presented his impressions of Japan’s architecture and craft industries in detail.⁴³ He expressed great admiration for the work ethic of Japan’s crafts makers and noted in his preface the Japanese “national style of conventional ornament” and that his book attempted “to explain how architecture resulted from climactic and religious influences, and how the ornaments with which domestic objects are figured, and the very finish of the objects themselves, are traceable to religious teachings.”⁴⁴ In his sophisticated understanding of the relationship of architecture and aesthetics to the culture’s religious values, he stands alone among his contemporaries. Dresser marveled not only at large monuments but also at minutiae, such as the metalwork of nail head covers and door hinges, that he declared “would supply the art student with material for study, and examples to copy, for weeks.”⁴⁵ Subsequent to this trip, Dresser promoted Japanese arts more intensely in exhibitions, lectures and publications, marveling that it had affected him more profoundly than his formal education.⁴⁶ Throughout his career, Dresser created designs, often as advisor to small, specialized manufacturing firms, for ceramics, furniture, textiles, wallpaper, carpets, glass, iron, and silver. Influenced by the approaches and design sensibilities of Japanese crafts makers, his own work emphasized designs suitable to the materials from which they were fashioned, introduced the use of standardized components, and featured abstracted, simplified natural motifs or fine geometrical patterns. Both prior to his trip and after his return, he was also involved with companies that imported Japanese artifacts to London.

Plate 3-13 Kyoto ware saké ewer with design of chrysanthemums in imitation of Dutch faience, 1840–1860. Earthenware with overglaze blue enamel over a white ground, height 7.6 cm, diameter 10.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 603&LID-1877. This ewer was purchased in 1877 from Londos & Co., who probably acquired it from Christopher Dresser, who had been in Japan earlier that year.

Josiah Conder (British, 1852–1920)
Conder trained as an architect at the University of London. In 1877, at the remarkably young age of twenty-four, he somehow managed to secure a position as the first architecture professor of the new Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo (now part of Tokyo University) without ever having designed a building himself.47 There, he taught the first Western-trained Japanese architects. He also designed a number of notable public and private buildings in Japan, both before and after leaving his teaching post in 1884, many of which remain standing today. In Japan, Conder was befriended by Frank Brinkley (p. 132), who also had come to Japan to work for a Japanese institution. Like Brinkley, he spent the duration of his life in the country, married a Japanese woman, and sought to transmit his knowledge of the culture to the Western public in numerous lectures in Japan and in publications widely read abroad.⁴⁸ Also like Brinkley, Conder studied Japanese painting with famed artist Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), about whom he authored a book and whose paintings he collected. More significant to the history of appreciation for Japanese design, however, were the books he wrote on flower arranging and gardens. His book, The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement, on ikebana, was published in 1891 by a Japanese publisher.⁴⁹ In its first part, he described the Japanese love of flowers throughout the seasons, opening with the following remark:

The flower charm which exists in Japan is not, however, mainly one of pastoral associations, but is closely connected with the national customs and the national art. The artistic character of the Japanese people is most strikingly displayed in their methods of interpreting the simpler of natural beauties.⁵⁰

Subsequent sections of the book explored flower arranging as an art form, beginning with a month-by-month chart of flowers, then moving on to the history and theory of ikebana and a discourse on the philosophical basis for the classifications and nomenclature for floral designs before delving into the particulars of the art, which he described with great specificity. Condor stressed that practicing ikebana was a form of self-cultivation, commenting that a “religious spirit, self denial, gentleness, and forgetfulness of cares, are some of the virtues said to follow from a habitual practice of the art of arrangement flowers.”⁵¹ His two volume set of books on garden design, Landscape Gardening in Japan and Supplement to Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893), featured lithograph drawings in the first volume and collotype photographs by pioneering photographer Ogawa Kazumasa (1860–1929) in the second. This was the first definitive publication on this subject in English. On the first page of his preface, Conder indicated that he strove to reveal “that beneath the quaint and unfamiliar aspects of these Eastern compositions, there lie universally accepted Art truths.” Thus, although he presented a short section on historical gardens and their variety, his book emphasized formalist “rules and theories” of the art, which could be understood and adapted by his Western audience, such as descriptions of rules for garden proportion, scale, rhythm, relationships between elements, and so forth.⁵³ In his seeking of universal art truths and linkage of art appreciation to morality, his ideas resonated with those of other art reformers of his age, such as Denman Waldo Ross (p. 120) and Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), among others.

Plate 3-14 Rikugien garden, Tokyo. Photo: Patricia J. Graham, May 2006. A nearly identical view of this garden was illustrated in a black and white collotype photograph by K. Ogawa in Conder’s supplement to his book Landscape Gardening in Japan, there titled “Garden at Komagome.” He described this lake view as “remarkable for its serene and unassuming grandeur.” He noted that the rocks in the center of the lake were “arranged to form an open archway, in imitation of hollowed sea-rocks which are seen at various places near the Japanese coast.”52 This beautiful stroll garden was originally constructed in the late seventeenth century as part of an estate of a powerful samurai warrior. Today, it is a public park.

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959)
America’s most notable twentieth-century architect, Wright is famous for his interest in Japanese art and architecture. When Wright came to Chicago to work as an apprentice architect after graduation from engineering school at the University of Wisconsin in 1887, he was immediately exposed to Japanese art and design aesthetics through his mentor, Louis Sullivan, who owned many books on the subject and collected Japanese art. One of those books must have been Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward Sylvester Morse (p. 125). The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, with its displays of Japanese arts of all sorts and actual Japanese buildings, must have further whetted his interest in Japanese design. His appreciation for Japanese prints began in the 1890s as well, through lectures at the Chicago fair by Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) and exposure to the art of Arthur Wesley Dow (p. 121), who lectured in Chicago, wrote for Chicago art journals, and who had an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago of his Japanese-influenced prints in that decade.⁵⁴ Wright first traveled to Japan in 1905, during which time he bought his first Japanese prints, and the next year he curated the first exhibition of the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige at the Art Institute.⁵⁵ So enamored was he of Japanese prints that he authored a book on the subject in 1912.⁵⁶ Although he declined to admit to direct influences from Japan, and insisted that nature was his source of influence, in his autobiography he wrote of his attraction to Japanese spiritual traditions, in part from his own observations during visits to Japan and in part influenced by the writings of Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136), passages from whose books he would occasionally quote.⁵⁷ By 1915 Wright was considered one of the most important American collectors and dealers of Japanese woodblock prints—he had thousands. Many he sold to his architectural clients for decoration in their homes, and he is said to have made more money from their sales than he did on the design of their houses. His role as a dealer, however, had been somewhat overlooked (his autobiography only mentions his selling of prints) until 1980 when Julia Meech, then working as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, decided to investigate the sources of acquisition of the museum’s vast Japanese print collection. Wright’s name was prominent among those from whom the prints were acquired. Wright also amassed a sizeable number of other types of Asian arts, including Japanese screens, Buddhist paintings, textiles, and Asian ceramics, carpets, and sculptures (mainly Chinese), but it was the prints that most seriously piqued his interest. Their attraction to him lay in their abstract design qualities as well as their vague (to him) spirituality, and he described his prints in terms of the values he professed for himself: “democracy, spirituality, purity, and harmony with nature.”⁵⁸

Bruno Taut (German, 1880–1938)
Taut was a modernist architect who had fled to Japan in 1933 to escape Nazi Germany. There, he developed a deep appreciation for traditional Japanese architecture, which resonated with his favoring of modernist-style architecture emphasizing functional buildings that exposed their underlying materials and lacked extraneous decoration. While lecturing on the subject at Tokyo Imperial University, he must have come to the attention of the Japanese government’s cultural authorities, because his two highly influential books on the subject, published in 1936 and 1937, were produced by a Japanese commercial publisher in conjunction with the Society for International Cultural Relations (KBS).⁵⁹ In his lectures and books, Taut praised Japanese native architecture generally as a superb contribution to world heritage, and heaped the highest praise on two buildings since then hailed as masterpieces of simplicity in accordance with modernist architectural values: the Katsura Imperial Villa (see pages 12-15) and the Imperial Shinto shrine at Ise (see Plate 2-5). Ise was the pre-eminent imperial Shinto shrine, closely associated with the emperor, so the KBS must have approved Taut’s admiration of it. Japanese modernist architects had before him already begun to appreciate Katsura in their efforts to find native sources for modern architecture, and they introduced him to it. Because he was the first to write in English about these buildings, until recently he was regarded as the first person to recognize their greatness.⁶⁰ He declared Katsura the epitome of Japanese architecture and a triumph of modernism, in contrast to the shogunal mausoleum shrines at Nikko which he reviled.

Plate 3-15 Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Camellias and Sparrows in Falling Snow, ca. 1837. Woodblock print with colors and embossing, 38.7 x 17 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1925.3637. Hiroshige was Wright’s favorite Japanese artist, and although he is best known today for his landscapes, Wright especially admired his bird and flower prints, which he recommended his architectural clients to use as decoration in their homes. This was one of many Japanese prints purchased by Clarence Buckingham from Frank Lloyd Wright in 1911.

Plate 3-16 View of the main shoin building at the Katsura Imperial Villa, completed ca. 1663. Photograph © peko-photo/photolibrary.jp. The building’s unpretentious appearance, clarity of forms, and elegantly balanced proportions of the structural elements, in contrast with the irregular shapes and placement of the stones that line the path, have earned this building the highest praise among admirers of traditional Japanese architecture.

JOURNALISTS

Frank (Captain Francis) Brinkley (Irish, 1841–1912)
Brinkley studied mathematics and classics at Trinity College, Dublin, then entered the Royal Military Academy from which he was dispatched to the Far East. He arrived in Japan in 1867, ostensibly for a brief tour but that, in fact, lasted for the duration of his life.61 Brinkley’s keen interest in Japanese arts led him to befriend fellow expatriate, designer Josiah Conder (p. 128). Linguistically gifted, he soon resigned his military post and after serving as advisor and instructor to the Japanese government, married a Japanese woman of samurai birth, then became owner and editor of the authoritative Japan Mail newspaper (forerunner to the Japan Times) in 1881. Brinkley’s prolific and wide-ranging writings about Japan included an authoritative Japanese language dictionary, war reports for The Times of London on the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, and several sets of books for the Boston publisher Josiah Millet, beginning with his editing Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese (1897– 1898; in 10–12 volumes, produced in standard, deluxe and imperial editions). Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136) was one of many Japanese authorities who contributed the essays for the publication that Brinkley himself translated into English. This set is famous for its inclusion of over 200

Plate 3-17 Okazaki Sessei (1854–1921), Pair of cast bronze door panels, 1890. Bronze with wood, each 218.5 x 137 x 3.5 cm. © 2013 University of Alberta Museums, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, Mactaggart Art Collection, 2010.21.11. These panels were first publicly and prominently displayed at the west court entrance to the Japanese art exhibition in the Palace of Fine Arts at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago in 1893 (see Plate 3-1). Brinkley wrote about them at length in volume 7 of his book, Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature, where he marveled at the technical tour de force of their production.

Lafcadio Hearn (Greek, naturalized Japanese, 1850–1904)
Hearn was born in Greece to an Irish army surgeon father and Greek-born mother. He moved to Ireland with his mother to live with his father’s relatives when his father was posted to the West Indies, but she soon abandoned him, as did his father soon afterwards. His father’s family paid for his education in France and Great Britain, until money ran out, whereupon at age nineteen he was sent to live with distant relatives in Cincinnati, Ohio. There, while living in poverty, he began a career as a newspaper reporter, which eventually took him to New Orleans, the West Indies, and then to Japan at age forty. He fell in love with the country and settled there permanently, marrying a Japanese woman from the Koizumi samurai clan, and changing his surname to hers when he became a Japanese citizen in 1896. While teaching at Tokyo Imperial and Waseda Universities, he wrote prolifically for Western readers about Japanese daily life and customs in books and a series of essays, in magazines such as Atlantic Monthly. Among his most popular books were Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904), and Kwaidan (1904). Although neither a collector of art nor an art critic, his writings nevertheless enthralled his foreign readers and both furthered their understanding of the psyche of the Japanese people and encouraged them to collect Japanese arts and crafts for their homes. Recent interest in this perceptive, eloquent, but nearly forgotten writer has been stimulated by Jonathan Cott’s moving biography, Wandering Ghost (1991).

Plate 3-18 Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), The Ghost of Okiku, a Scene from the Kabuki Play Banchō Sarayashiki,1892, 10^th month. Color woodblock print triptych, 107.9 x 24.4 cm. Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Gift of H. Lee Turner, 1968.0001.266.a,b,c . At the time Hearn lived in Japan, ghoulish and spine-chilling ghostly tales, of which there are hundreds, were all the rage and his books and magazine essays introduced many of them to Western readers. These were popularized in paintings and prints such as this triptych, comprised of three single sheet prints aligned vertically to resemble a scroll painting (see Plate 2-54). It portrays a scene from a famous Kabuki play about the ghost Okiku, about whom Hearn wrote in his essay “In a Japanese Garden” published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine.⁶² Okiku, a servant, was blackmailed by her master into becoming his mistress. To avoid that fate, she threw herself into a well and drowned. Thereafter, as seen here, she emerged nightly to haunt him.

PHILOSOPHERS

Ernest Fenollosa (American, 1853–1908)
A native of Salem, Massachusetts, Fenollosa is legendary for inspiring appreciation of Japanese art and design both in Japan and the West. He studied philosophy and divinity at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and first went to Japan in 1878 to teach political economy and philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, through introductions from Edward Sylvester Morse (p. 125). While there, he visited numerous ancient religious sites, collected art, and together with his protégé Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136) was among those who worked to found Japan’s first art training school, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō), encouraging Tokyo-based artists to create new styles of traditional painting (Nihonga). In Boston, Fenollosa became the first curator of Oriental art at the Museum of Fine Arts (1890–1895), but was dismissed because of a scandal surrounding his divorce and immediate remarriage. He was an advisor to Boston area Japanese art collector Charles Goddard Weld (1857–1911), to whom he sold his personal collection, which was later donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, and he also associated with other fans of Japan, particularly John La Farge (p. 118), Denman Waldo Ross (p. 120), Arthur Wesley Dow (p. 121), Percival Lowell (p. 126), and collector William Sturgis Bigelow. Like them, Fenollosa was greatly attracted to Asian spiritual traditions through his study of Japanese art and he also converted to Buddhism. In 1893, Fenollosa, together with Morse, served as judge for the pottery competition at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he also lectured on art education, based on his experiences in Japan. Later, he advised Detroit collector Charles Lang Freer, whose collection became the core of the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Museums. In his survey book, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design, whose text he completed in 1906 and which was published posthumously by his wife in 1912,⁶⁴ he outlined his ideas on the spiritual qualities and design principles of Japanese art. There, he mentioned the term nōtan, the dark–light principle about which his disciple Dow had previously written. He also praised Japanese painters of the Rinpa School above all others, calling them “the greatest painters of tree and flower forms the world has ever seen.”⁶⁵ Rinpa artists, he noted, were also highly esteemed among élite Japanese collectors, who, like him, appreciated their abstracted, simplified design sensibility and bold application of color, celebrated as being devoid of foreign influences. His commentary echoed and expanded upon writings on Rinpa artists by Louis Gonse (p. 142), whose book he reviewed at length, with specific critique of Gonse’s discussion of Rinpa.⁶⁶ Although erroneous and outdated even at the time of its publication, Fenollosa’s Epochs has often been reprinted. Other unpublished notes by Fenollosa on translations of Japanese Nō plays and Chinese poetry were published posthumously, edited by modernist writer Ezra Pound, for whom the metaphysical concepts expounded upon by Fenollosa served as important catalysts for his own writings throughout his career.

Plate 3-19 Anonymous Rinpa School Artist, Autumn Trees and Grasses by a Stream, second half 17^th century. Left half of a six-panel folding screen, ink, color, gold, and silver on paper, 121.9 x 312.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 15.127. Fenollosa sometimes misattributed fine unsigned Rinpa paintings such as this one to the school’s founder, Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637). He included a reproduction of a section of this screen in his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, and noted that its “aesthetic purity and loftiness of both line and color come out in perfect combination.”63

Okakura Kakuzō (also called Tenshin), Japanese, 1863–1913)
Arguably the most widely influential and contentious Japanese intellectual of his day, Okakura was, in the words of John Clark,

interested both in art and theories of the state. He served as government bureaucrat, but was also a poet and writer in both Japanese and English. He worked as an art educationalist, an art-world administrator, and an art movement ideologist. He was engaged as a curator for the Imperial Household Museum and wrote major, pioneering works as a member of the first generation of modern Japanese art historians. In his views of the outside world he was both an ultranationalist and an internationalist.67

Okakura was born and raised in Yokohama, with its large foreign population, where he received both a Western missionary and traditional Japanese temple-schooled education. He later studied philosophy under Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) at Tokyo Imperial University. Through Fenollosa, Okakura met the “Boston Orientalists” William Sturgis Bigelow, Henry Adams, and John La Farge (p. 118), with whom he developed a close friendship and obtained entry into the world of New York and Bostonian high society when he visited for the first time in 1886. Okakura worked on projects with Fenollosa in conjunction with the political élite of Japan who sought to modernize their nation through the infusion of Western-influenced institutional structures. These included surveys of historic temples and shrines and the co-founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, that he directed from 1890 until his ouster in 1896 (when he established an alternative school with funding from Bigelow). In 1901, Okakura made his first trip to India, where he lodged in Calcutta with the family of famed Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), who became his good friend. There, Okakura wrote his first English language book, The Ideals of the East (1903), in which he praised Japanese cultural heritage as a culmination of and naturalization of Indian spirituality (as transmitted to Japan through Buddhism), and Chinese humanism, which he saw as a synthesis of the Chinese philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism. Japan’s role on the global scene, he believed, was to transmit these Oriental ideals to the West, an idea he expressed with the phrase “Asia is one,” the opening line of this book. His writings here and elsewhere indicated that he believed not only in a binary opposition between Asia and the West but also in Japan’s superiority over the West.⁶⁸ In 1904, he returned to the United States and became curator of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. At this time, he became close to collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and began holding tea ceremonies as a way of introducing Westerners to the essence of Japanese culture. His subsequent, and most successful publication, The Book of Tea (1906), was dedicated to his friend La Farge. It presented a more positive and overarching assessment of Japanese aesthetics that presented participation in the tea ceremony as a means to impart beauty and profound meaning to one’s life. Right at its beginning, he described “teaism”

as a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.⁶⁹

Plate 3-20 Takamura Kōun (1852–1934), One of a pair of ranma (transom) panels from the Phoenix Hall (Hōōden) at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Wood with polychrome, 95 x 280 x 20 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Conservation made possible by an anonymous donor, Roger L. Weston, Richard and Heather Black, Patricia Welch Bro, Mary S. Lawton, John K. Notz, Jr, Richard and Janet Horwood, Charles Haffner III, Mrs Marilynn B. Alsdorf, and Walter and Karen Alexander, 2009.631. Okakura Kakuzō served as a member of Japan’s committee that selected objects for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, in his role as director of the art section at the Tokyo Imperial Museum. This enabled him to arrange for art by Takamura Kōun and other members of his school’s faculty to be well represented there and for them to create the interior room decorations for the Hōōden, the Japanese national building that was erected at the fair. This recently restored transom panel is one of the few treasures from this building to have survived.

He described tea as “the cup of humanity” and its tea room as “the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical,” a mere cottage constructed of wood and bamboo. Obviously this was not a guide to the formal preparation of tea but rumination on how to make sense of its aesthetic world. Because of the great response to his book, the chanoyu tea ceremony gained currency as the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.

Plate 3-21 Garden path stepping stones at the Sumiya, Kyoto, late 17^th–18^th century. In his book Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki endeavored to credit Zen for inspiring the well-known Japanese penchant for asymmetrical balance, which he illustrated with an example of stepping stones similar to those in this photograph. He likened the preference for imperfection and asymmetry to “the Zen way of looking at individual things as perfect in themselves and at the same time embodying the nature of totality which belongs to the One.”⁷⁰

D. T. (Daisetsu Teitaro) Suzuki (Japanese, 1870–1966)
A seminal and controversial figure, Suzuki has profoundly influenced perceptions of Zen and its influence on Japanese arts and culture in the West. He possessed a broad intellectual curiosity, impeccable academic training, and stellar linguistic competency in several Asian and European languages, including English. He first studied at Tokyo Imperial University, and there began training under the esteemed and cosmopolitan Zen master Sōen Shaku (1860–1919) of Engakuji in Kamakura. Through him, Suzuki met Paul Carus (1852–1919), philosopher of comparative religions, while attending the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and subsequently lived with Carus in Illinois for several years from 1905, working on translations of Asia religious texts. In 1911, he married Beatrice Lane, an American follower of Theosophy, who encouraged his investigations into the nature of divinity and spiritual wisdom. He became a professor of Buddhist philosophy, first at Gakushūin in Tokyo and from 1919 in Kyoto at Ōtani University. During the 1930s, influenced by prevailing discourses that sought to promote the uniqueness of the Japanese people, his lectures and essays for both foreign and native audiences described Zen as the underlying basis for Japan’s love of nature, its aesthetics and art forms, including haiku poetry, architecture and gardens, the tea ceremony of chanoyu, and swordsman-ship. The first of his writings in this vein was published by the Society for Intercultural Relations (KBS) that also published works by Bruno Taut (p. 130), Harada Jirō (p. 147), and Tsuda Noritake (p. 148) around the same time. In 1938, his talks and writing were compiled into a book, Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture. Suzuki returned to the USA in 1949 and remained there for ten years, guest lecturing at various universities and teaching in the philosophy department at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957, where his students included many leading intellectuals. He also authored numerous popular and scholarly volumes in English about the Zen school, Buddhism and Asian spirituality during this time. His best known work of this period, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), revised and expanded his 1938 volume on the subject.⁷¹ Although his viewpoint elevates certain aesthetics at the expense of other, equally characteristic ones, for example overemphasizing the importance of the chanoyu tea ceremony aesthetics of wabi and sabi, it remains a classic.⁷² Through these lectures and writings Suzuki initiated a boom in interest in Zen in America that has continued unabated ever since.⁷³

Plate 3-22 Karatsu ware (Yumino kiln) large kneading bowl, 18th century. Glazed stoneware, height 18.5 cm, diameter of mouth 55.9 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 33-1587. Photo: Joshua Ferdinand. This type of bowl, with its naive, rustic beauty and rough and vigorous painting of a simple pine tree over a clay surface covered with white slip, was one of the types of folk ceramics much admired by Yanagi Sōetsu. Yanagi personally selected this piece for the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s collection at the request of his friend Langdon Warner (p. 144), the museum’s first advisor for Asian art.

Yanagi Sōetsu (Japanese, 1889–1961)
An upper-class Tokyo-born philosopher of religions, Yanagi was the person who first identified and described arts and crafts created by and for the common people as mingei (page 46). He was much inspired by the Socialist-influenced philosophy of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, whose followers deplored industrialized mass-produced crafts and believed that the aesthetic expression of a culture lay not in products created for élites by famous artists but in the anonymous products of the common people. British potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979), a leader of the British movement, was a close friend. Leach was responsible for introducing Western readers to Yanagi’s writings.⁷⁴ Yanagi believed that mingei was a defining element of Japanese civilization that distinguished Japan’s modern cultural identity from that of the Asian mainland and of the West, an idea which fit the fervent nationalistic sentiment of his era.⁷⁵ In 1931, Yanagi founded the Japanese Folk Craft Association and began promoting his ideas in the magazine Kōgei (“Crafts,” which merged with the journal Mingei in 1952). In 1935, he began organizing exhibitions of folk crafts in a museum he founded in Tokyo, the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Tokyo Mingeikan). For this museum, he collected not only crafts made in Japan but also those made in Korea, which Japan then occupied. The art dealer Yamanaka Sadajirō (1865–1936) helped spread appreciation for mingei among collectors in the West by selling examples of these arts in his galleries. Langdon Warner (p. 144), a great admirer, quoted a favorite saying of Yanagi in several of his publications: “If the repetition of a machine is the death of all art, the manual repetition by a craftsman is the very mother of skill and skill is the mother of beauty.”⁷⁶

ART HISTORIANS AND ART CRITICS

James Jackson Jarves (American, 1818–1888)
A cultured and prolific art critic, Jarves published one of the earliest books about Japanese art, A Glimpse at the Art of Japan (1876), despite having never visited the country. It was such an influential volume that as late as 1933 a reviewer for the New England Quarterly gave it a glowing assessment.77 A native of Boston, Jarves was an inveterate traveler who lived for a time in Hawaii and the South Seas, where he dabbled in newspaper publishing before traveling to Europe in 1851 and settling permanently in Florence, Italy, soon afterwards. There, as a self-taught amateur, he began a career as a writer about art for the American public. By the time he penned his book on Japanese art, he was a respected authority as well as a serious collector of Old Master drawings and Italian paintings, which inspired Jarves to punctuate his book with comparisons between the Japanese and Europeans. He included mainly prints and book illustrations by the ukiyoe artist Katsushika Hokusai, then all the rage in Europe. But in many respects, he demonstrated a high level of perceptiveness about Japanese culture and its arts, commenting on the importance of nature and its dominance in poetic imagery, stating “no people more thoroughly understand the respective offices of Art and Nature, and where to draw the boundary between them.”⁷⁸ He also lavishly praised Japanese craftsmen, noting that “the workman was a thorough worker and master of his particular art, content with nothing short of absolute technical perfection, aesthetic and material, in every object he undertook, whether it was cheap or valuable.”⁷⁹ Not surprisingly, he especially admired detail-oriented and technically challenging arts such as Satsuma ceramics, bronzes, lacquers, and ivories, all popular export products readily available in Europe. Elsewhere he commented on the propensity of the Japanese to create wonderfully wrought useful objects, declaring “the mechanical perfection of Japanese carpentry, metal work, papers, leather, in short whatever they manufacture, from a mammoth bell down to a box-hinge or hairpin (Plate 3-23), is quite as conspicuous to the eye of a mechanic as are the aesthetic features of objects of art to an artist’s senses.”⁸⁰

Plate 3-23 Dangling hairpin (Bira kanzashi), Edo period (1615–1868). The hairpin has a gold flower with a coral center and other silver and coral flowers, long dangling blossoms and small coral pale balls, and a plum-shaped pendant. Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, William Bridges Thayer Memorial, 1928.0321. James Jackson Jarves admired finely wrought functional objects such as this.

Plate 3-24 Félix Hilaire Buhot, artist (French, 1847–1898); Henri Charles Guérard, etcher (French, 1846–1897), Masque en Bois, from the series Japonisme: Dix Eaux-Fortes (Japonisme: Ten Etchings), 1883. Etching on yellow handmade Chinese paper with silver and gold leaf, sheet/paper 32.8 x 27.7 cm. Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1989.0015.02. Between 1874 and 1885 Burty hired print maker Félix Hilaire Buhot to create a portfolio of ten prints, later published commercially, featuring examples from the various categories of Japanese arts he collected. This sheet depicts a Japanese demon mask (ko-besihimi type) for the Nō theater. The inscription in black ink to the left of the mask records the name of the mask maker (Deme Yūkan, d. 1652), probably copied from the artist’s inscription carved into the back of the mask. Burty intended the series to be distributed to a broad audience so as to help popularize Japanese arts.81 The rare printing of this particular set was done on cheap, imported, and previously used Chinese paper. The red characters, printed in China, and appearing upside down in this composition, impart an exotic Oriental aura to the image.

Plate 3-25 Amida Buddha, originally from Banryūji, Meguro District, Tokyo, mid-18^th century. Cast bronze, height 440 cm. Musée Cernuschi, Paris. Photo © Philippe Ladet/ Musée Cernuschi/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works. This statue was one of the most famous objects Henri Cernuschi brought back to Paris from Japan. The public first saw it when he lent his collection to an exhibition at the Palais de L’Industrie in 1873–4. Afterwards, it held a prominent place in his Parisian mansion that, upon his death in 1896, was turned into a public museum. Theodore Duret (p. 141) made it even more famous with inclusion of it in his book, Voyage en Asie (1874), and his evocative comments that “his features convey absolute calm, the absence of passion and of desire, and the stamp of this type of ecstasy particular to Buddha, who, detached from everything and freed from life, has achieved the dissolution of his own feelings, even of his personality; that is to say, all that Buddhist metaphysicians and theologians could conceive or dream, the artist has here realized in bronze.”⁸²

Philippe Burty (French, 1830–1890)
Burty was an early art critic who advocated appreciation of Impressionist artists and other new art trends, as well as a writer and collector of Japanese arts. His enormous and diverse collection of Japanese art (sold after his death) included woodblock prints, sword guards, bronze sculptures, ceramics, lacquers, theatrical masks (Plate 3-24), inrō, and textiles. His friends and associates in the art world included the art dealer Siegfred Bing (p. 122), from whom he acquired some of his art and for whose journal he contributed essays on ceramics and pottery, and artists Edouard Manet (1832–1883), John La Farge (p. 118), and James McNeill Whistler, the latter also patronized by Marcus Huish (p. 123). So enthralled was he with all things Japanese that he helped found the secret Jing-Lar Society in Sèvres, France (home of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory), in 1866–7. This small group of like-minded artists and writers gathered to celebrate Japanese culture by dressing in kimono and eating Japanese food with chopsticks. Burty’s interest in Japanese arts related to his desire to see them used as models for the decorative artists of his country, whose works he considered lackluster. He admired Japanese artists’ technical virtuosity and incorporation of themes from nature, which he linked to Western aesthetics associated with romanticism. His writings in various journals highlighted not only Japanese aesthetics and design characteristics (asymmetry, color sensibility, facility in drawing) but also the manners and customs of the Japanese people, which he, like many others of his time, considered inseparable from understanding the culture’s art forms. He is perhaps best known for coining the widely used French term Japonisme, in an article for the journal La Renaissance Littéraire et Artistique in 1872, which he defined as “a new field of study—artistic, historic, and ethnographic.”⁸⁵

Plate 3-26 Unidentified Artist of the Chōshū School, Sword guard (tsuba) with openwork design of insects and autumn grasses, 18^th century. Iron, diameter 7.1 cm. The Walters Art Museum, 51.403. Sword guards were among the most popular Japanese decorative arts collected in France in the late nineteenth century and Louis Gonse (p. 142) featured a number of them in his book. This one, with its abstracted, asymmetrical design of imagery from the natural world exemplifies the type that was most in vogue in Gonse’s day.

Plate 3-27 Ogawa Ritsuō (Haritsu; 1663–1747), Pair of Niō Guardians. Carved and stained softwood with paint-lacquer decoration to the skirts, height of Misshaku 24.7 cm, height of Naraen (left) 24.6 cm. Collection of Sydney L. Moss, Ltd. In his book Japanese Art, Sadakichi Hartmann (p. 142) praised Ritsuō’s sculpture and described him as “the most skillful lacquerer the world has ever known.”⁸³ His comments relied on an article, “Ritsuō and His School,” by British collector Ernest Hart, that had appeared in Artistic Japan. There, Hart illustrated these Niō and commended them for preserving the grandeur and strength of the celebrated originals they copied.”⁸⁴

Théodore Duret (French, 1838–1927)
Duret was a political journalist and an important art critic, the first to promote Impressionism, and who later in life coined the term avant garde. His interest in Japan was aroused during a three-month stay in 1871, part of a grand tour of Asia that he undertook together with his friend, the collector Henri (Enrico) Cernuschi (1821–1896), an Italian émigré banker who resided in Paris. Duret became especially smitten with Japanese prints, which he collected and gave to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1900. His 1882 book on Katushika Hokusai helped propel that artist’s fame in Europe.86 He was also acquainted with Siegfred Bing (p. 122), for whose journal, Artistic Japan, he contributed articles about engraving on Japanese prints and the decorative artistry of Japanese combs, noting that the Japanese were the first to transform the comb into an ornamental object. Duret also helped to stimulate Western interest in Buddhism, its material culture, and in Cernuschi’s vast collection of Buddhist art in his 1874 book, Voyage en Asie⁸⁷ (see Plate 3-25).

Louis Gonse (French, 1846–1921)
Gonse was a well respected art critic whose friends included Siegfred Bing (p. 122), collector Henri Cernuschi, Philippe Burty (p. 140), Theodore Duret (p. 141), and other Japanese art enthusiasts. Gonse holds the distinction of being the first foreigner to author a major historical survey in a Western language on the art of Japan, L’Art Japonais, which was originally published in French in 1883 and translated into English in 1891.⁸⁸ It featured many works from Cernuschi’s collection, including the Buddha statue that Duret had praised in his book Voyage en Asie (Plate 3-25), and objects from Bing’s and Burty’s collections, as well as from his own, which included netsuke carvings (judging from the examples he included in his book, he appears to have been partial to animals), sword guards (see Plate 3-26), masks, and ceramics. In L’Art Japonais, he extolled highest praise upon lacquers, which he described as “the glory of Japan.” Gonse also contributed to his friend Bing’s journal, Artistic Japan, where, for the first issue (1888), he famously described the Japanese as “the foremost decorators in the world” in his essay “Génie des Japonais dans le Décor” (The genius of the Japanese in décor). For number 23 of that journal (1890), he excerpted passages from his book in an article about the design genius of the Rinpa School painter Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), the first in the West to do so.⁸⁹ The Rinpa School and Kōrin, in particular, were later highly praised by Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), as noted above.⁹⁰

Sadakichi Hartmann (Japanese/German/American, 1867–1944)
Hartmann was an art critic who wrote about a wide range of visual, literary, and dramatic art forms, including American and Japanese art, photography, and the aesthetics of Japanese-style poetry and Nō drama. He is best known today as a pioneer of photography criticism.⁹¹ Poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) credited him as the first to write in English using the Japanese short three-line poetic form of haiku (haikai) and the longer verse form of tanka.⁹² Hartmann was born in Nagasaki, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a German businessman father, but after his mother died in childbirth he was sent him to live with relatives in Hamburg, Germany. Upon remarriage, his father enrolled him in military school, but he rebelled, was disinherited, and at age fourteen was sent to America to live with relatives in Philadelphia. There he worked in menial jobs by day and voraciously studied art at night. Hartmann furthered his studies through self-financed summer trips to Europe. Ambitious, inquisitive, brazen, and passionate, he befriended the elderly poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), for whom he occasionally translated German correspondence, and who inspired him to pursue a career in the arts. Because of his Japanese heritage and its popularity in the art world of his day, Hartmann was drawn to all things Japanese. His Asian appearance gave him an air of authority about what was then called Oriental art, despite his upbringing entirely in the West. In an article in the Paris Herald (September 1906), writer Vance Thompson described him as “[o]ne of the strangest and most original men of letters of the day…. He was born in the land of wistarias and chrysanthemums, and he sees life with that Japanese anarchy of perspective. His gifts are abundant and multiform, and his genius for writing has many modes and moods. He is lyric, naive and mystic, brutally realistic, dramatic at turns and for all that eminently oriental.”⁹³ Hartmann’s writings on Japanese art bear consideration because he was the first writer to address the influence of Japanese art and design on American artists in his two-volume survey book (1902),⁹⁴ where he commented on Japanese influence on artists such as Arthur Wesley Dow (p. 121). Hartmann only wrote one book specifically on Japanese art (1903),⁹⁵ that he described as a publication for the layman, with a bibliography that indicated his familiarity with all the major Western writers on both Japanese art and culture, whom he often paraphrased (see Plate 3-27), and with chapters that surveyed the usual types of arts, arranged loosely within an overly simplified historical framework emphasizing the art of his own time.

Plate 3-28 View of Matsushima. Photograph © Greir11/Dreamstime.com. As a poet, Laurence Binyon is most famous for his war poem, “For the Fallen,” written in 1914. But his poems about some of Japan’s most sacred historic sites—Mt Kōya, Matsushima, Hakone, and Miyajima—written following his 1929 trip to Japan are admired for the contemplative imagery that reveals his deep love and knowledge of Japanese culture. Scholarly in tone, they have been described as “early examples of a sober receptiveness to Japanese culture.”⁹⁶ The first stanza of Binyon’s poem “Matsushima” is quoted below.⁹⁷
        O paradise of waters and of isles that gleam,
        Dark pines on scarps that flame white in a mirrored sky,
        A hundred isles that change like a dissolving dream
        From shape to shape for them that with the wind glide by!

Laurence Bi nyon (British, 1869–1943)
Binyon was a prolific poet, playwright, and art historian with expertise in British, Persian, and Japanese pictorial arts. He worked at the British Museum for the duration of his career, from 1893 to 1933, first as an assistant in the Departments of Printed Books, and Prints and Drawings, and from 1913 as the first Keeper of the new Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings. That appointment followed publication, in 1908, of a broad survey book on the history of East Asian painting which helped elevate his status to the foremost authority in the West on Japanese pictorial arts.98 In the book, he echoed the praises of Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134) and others that the paintings of the Rinpa School should be considered as the “supreme achievements of pictorial design.”⁹⁹ Binyon’s dual vocations, as both a talented poet and respected art historian, enabled him to influence individuals with varied interests in Japan, including Arthur Waley (1889–1966), the eminent scholar and translator of Chinese and Japanese literature who was his assistant at the museum, and the poet Ezra Pound. Fairly early in his career, in 1911, he contributed a volume to publisher John Murray’s extensive Wisdom of the East Series, where in language both poetic and erudite he endeavored to explain to Westerners motivations of Chinese and Japanese painters, with special focus on the significance of nature.¹⁰⁰ His text explored both the spiritual basis for Far Eastern painting as well as its formalist design characteristics, describing the painters’ emphasis on light and shade with Fenollosa and Dow’s term nōtan, which he equated on page 86 of his book with the Western term “chiaroscuro.” Binyon made only one trip to Japan, in 1929 (see Plate 3-28), to present a series of lectures at Tokyo Imperial University in which he compared Western and Japanese art and cultural traditions. In 1933–4, he delivered a series of six lectures at Harvard University in its Charles Eliot Norton Lecture series that were subsequently published in a volume he dedicated to Langdon Warner (p. 144).¹⁰¹ In it, he addressed some of the major themes and topics that had engaged his interest over the course of his career, including the influence of Zen on East Asian arts and ukiyoe. He made references to the writings of Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136) about the shared heritage of Asian art, and Arthur Waley’s recent and now classic translation of The Tale of Genji.

Langdon Warner (American, 1881–1955)
An art historian and curator, Warner learned to appreciate Japanese art and design from an impressive group of mentors, all members of the first generation of scholars, collectors, and curators of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Denman Wald Ross (p. 120), Okakura Kakuzō (p. 136), and Yanagi Sōetsu (p. 138). From Okakura, Warner learned about the chanoyu tea ceremony and its aesthetics. From Ross and, through him indirectly, from Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), he acquired a fondness for Japanese design and craftsmanship. From Yanagi, Warner developed an interest in mingei. Although his temperament prevented him from pursuing an advanced degree, Warner eventually became one of the most influential Asian art historians in the United States. After graduating from Harvard in 1903, he came under the tutelage of Okakura, who sent him off to Japan for training before allowing him to work as his assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Before he parted from the museum in 1913 for a more glamorous position as head of archaeological expeditions in China and Inner Asia, he organized, in 1910, an exhibition on Japanese stencils from the collection of William Sturgis Bigelow, noting in the catalogue introduction, published in the museum’s Bulletin, that typically “the processes have interested this Museum much less than results, and we have seldom gone into the technique of the arts of which we possess examples.”¹⁰² This fascination with the process of art creation in relation to stencils was probably derived from acquaintance with the highly influential art educator Arthur Wesley Dow (p. 121), an outspoken advocate of their usefulness as teaching tools. For much of his later career, he worked at Harvard as curator and lecturer, in the same department as Denman Ross, where he taught the first ever course on Oriental art at any American university. In addition, he served as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and advised the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art on Asian acquisitions. He also coordinated several major loan exhibitions of treasures from Japan, both before and after World War II, in cooperation with Japanese officials, including Tsuda Noritake (p. 148), for the Arts of the Pacific Basin exhibition in San Francisco in 1939. His greatest love was for Japanese Buddhist sculpture, about which he published several volumes in the pre-war period, but he is best remembered for his small but thoughtful late work, The Enduring Art of Japan (1952), in which he expressed the aesthetic and cultural values that he so admired in the Japanese people.¹⁰³ There, he wrote of the many ways attentiveness to nature nurtured the artist. In a chapter on Buddhism, he wrote “nature suggests the materials used by the artist and the limitations that cramp him,”¹⁰⁴ and in a chapter on Japan’s native religion of Shinto as “nurse of the arts,” he mused that “possession of the mysteries of a craft means nothing less than a power over nature gods and it creates a priest out of the man who controls it.”¹⁰⁵ Influenced by Yanagi in his comments about folk art, he remarked that “an individual genius, however his accomplishment may astonish and delight us, will always express himself and will therefore necessarily be of less significance than an artist who expresses us all.”¹⁰⁶ These sorts of impassioned remarks endeared him to his students, and his many friends in Japan, where he remains a much beloved figure for whom four memorials were erected posthumously in recognition of his efforts to save historic monuments and arts from bombings during World War II.¹⁰⁷

Plate 3-29 Nō or Kyōgen theater under robe (noshime) with blue and white plaid pattern, first half 19 century. Blue and white kasuri (ikat) weave silk, 149.9 x 154.9 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32–142/15. Photo: Tiffany Matson Warner purchased 157 magnificent examples of textiles from Kyoto for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, his first acquisitions for the deceptively simple and rare design creates a striking presence on stage.

Plate 3-30 Chanoyu tea house in the garden of the Tokyo National Museum. Photo: Patricia J. Graham, May 2012. This tea house was designed by tea master Kobori Enshū (1579–1647) for his private residence in Kyoto. After being relocated several times, it came into the collection of the Tokyo National Museum in 1963. The rustic appearance of the structure, with its plain wood surfaces and thatch roof, epitomizes the understated and humble aesthetics of chanoyu praised by Harada Jirō.

Harada Jirō (Japanese, 1878–1963)
Harada worked for many years at the Imperial Household Agency, the administrative body to the Tokyo Imperial Museum (now the Tokyo National Museum). He authored numerous books about traditional Japanese art and aesthetics in English between 1928 and 1954, on topics as varied as Japanese landscape gardening (which he tied to Japanese concepts of spirituality), architecture, including the Shugakuin and Katsura Imperial Villas, and the eighth century Shōsōin Imperial Treasure House at Tōdaiji, Nara, as well as masks, textiles, woodblock printing, and incense boxes.108 Although many details of his life remain unknown, he obviously had a great command of English, probably having learned it as a child, as did D. T. Suzuki (p. 137), who was his contemporary and whose views on the uniqueness of Japanese aesthetics seem similar to those Harada expressed in his books, especially his A Glimpse of Japanese Ideals (1937).¹⁰⁹ That book compiled some of the lectures he presented at various universities in the United States over the course of thirteen months beginning in the autumn of 1935. His trip and the book that resulted were sponsored by the Society for Intercultural Relations, which arranged for him to have a visiting lectureship at the University of Oregon for fall and winter terms and to lecture at other universities on the Pacific West Coast and in Boston in the spring, to help promote the exhibition of Japanese art treasures that took place at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1936. The tone of his writing is learned and engaging but also off-putting because of its digression into imperialist and nationalist rhetoric, for example, describing the number one character of the Japanese people as their spirit of loyalty and patriotism¹¹⁰ and that their “taste for art and refinement [was] side by side with their admiration for military prowess.”¹¹¹ Harada’s lectures and his writings all focused on sophisticated pre-modern Japanese arts associated with the élites of society, most of which had been designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties by the Japanese government. These arts had never before been displayed in the West and he made a point of emphasizing to his audiences that there was so much more to appreciate about Japanese art than the ukiyoe prints that were then widely collected in the West. He stressed the aesthetics of shibumi (otherwise known as shibui), sabi, and wabi, which had emerged in tandem with the chanoyu tea ceremony, expanding upon the writings of Okakura (p. 136). Harada described chanoyu as “an institution founded on the adoration of the beautiful in the midst of the sordid facts of everyday life”¹¹² and implied, rather simplistically, that its five guiding principles—sincerity, harmony, respect, cleanliness, and tranquility¹¹³—had impacted various facets of Japanese culture and art, including its architecture, landscape gardening, calligraphy, painting, applied arts, interior decoration, and etiquette¹¹⁴ and represented the driving force of Japanese aesthetics.

Plate 3-31 Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion) and garden, Rokuonji, Kyoto National Treasure. Photograph © Denimjuls/Dreamstime. com. Originally built in the 1390s as the private retreat of a wealthy and powerful warrior ruler, it was turned into a Buddhist memorial temple to him after his death. It was destroyed by arson in 1950 and meticulously reconstructed in 1964. The Kinkakuji pavilion and its garden, still a top tourist destination in Kyoto today, were among the famous temple sites featured in Tsuda Noritake’s Handbook of Japanese Art.

Tsuda Noritake (Japanese, 1883–ca. 1961)
Tsuda was an enigmatic and prolific pre-war scholar who did graduate studies at Tokyo Imperial University in religion and Asian art. He was employed in succession from the 1910s through the 1930s by the Tokyo Imperial Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Imperial Japanese Railways, and the Society for Intercultural Relations. His many publications reveal an enthusiasm for cultural and ethnic nationalism, evident in varied degrees in the art writings of other Japanese at that time: Okakura (p. 136), Yanagi (p. 138), and Harada (p. 147). While in the employ of the Society for International Cultural Relations in the 1930s, in addition to writing Handbook of Japanese Art, an authoritative survey book on Japanese art that remains in print to this day,¹¹⁵ Tsuda coordinated two US exhibitions of treasures from Japan for the Society, one in Boston in 1936 and the other in San Francisco in 1939, the latter together with organizer Langdon Warner (p. 144), whom he had met in Japan in 1918. His abovementioned book, first published in 1935, has the distinction of being the first survey of Japanese art, gardens and architecture in English by a Japanese author. It presents an official Japanese perspective, having been published in Japan by a commercial Japanese publisher working in close cooperation with the Society for International Cultural Relations for whom Tsuda was then employed. Its publication was timed to prepare the public for the 1936 Boston exhibition of Japanese treasures that Tsuda helped to coordinate. The book situated within historic, religious, and cultural contexts the buildings, gardens, and arts created by the historical élites of society and artists of prestigious lineages that the government was promoting to the world as its cultural patrimony, many having been recently designated as National Treasures (see Plate 3-31). These were described in the book’s second part, a guide to major temples and museums. Collections highlighted included those of the Imperial Household (the emperor’s personal collection), the three great “Imperial” national museums in Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo, and the most esteemed ancient temples and shrines of those cities and elsewhere. Despite its aim, Tsuda’s tone throughout was never imperious but was passionate and engaging, even when describing the fine craftsman-ship of the arts, which he must have included to showcase the creative genius of Japanese artists’ technical skills. The book also featured a section on ukiyoe prints, no doubt because of their popularity with foreign audiences. The book, alas, included some obvious factual errors known as such even in his own time, errors derived from writings by Ernest Fenollosa (p. 134), whom Tsuda greatly admired.

THE LEGACY OF THE EARLY WRITERS

Despite much new scholarship on Japanese design in recent decades, older writings have not been entirely forgotten. The pre-eminence of modern and contemporary Japanese designers, and the expansion of scholarly studies of Japanese art history and visual culture, Japonisme, Japanese architectural history, and global design history, have all contributed to a wider appreciation for Japanese design. Understanding has been considerably facilitated by increased availability of many pre-war volumes on Japanese arts and design that publishers have been reprinting since the 1960s. Reprints in modest or deluxe facsimile editions include books by most, but not all, of the early writers discussed in this chapter: Alcock, Binyon, Brinkley, Conder, Dow, Dresser, Duret, Fenollosa, Harada, Hearn, Huish, Jarves, Lowell, Morse, Okakura, Ross, Siebold, Suzuki, Tsuda, Warner, and Yanagi. These reprints cater mainly to two markets—readers interested in the history of Japanese studies in the West and art and design educators/ practitioners. Tuttle Publications has reprinted many books that fit the former category and Dover Publications the latter. Reprints of old books aimed at designers include some rare early volumes on narrow subjects, including The Book of Delightful and Strange Designs: Being One Hundred Fac-Simile Illustrations of the Art of the Japanese Stencil-Cutter, originally published in London in 1892.¹¹⁶ It illustrated Japanese stencils from the collection of the book’s author, British publisher Andrew Tuer (1838–1900). That book had helped spread interest in stencils as an art form, and was produced simultaneously in English, French, and German editions.

Plate 3-32 Cover of “The Grammar of Japanese Ornament,” by George Ashdown Audsley, T. W. Cutler, and Charles Newton (New York: Arch Cape Press, 1989). This reprint excerpted and compiled into a single volume the sumptuously illustrated texts by George Ashdown Audsley (The Ornamental Arts of Japan, 1882) and Thomas W. Cutler (A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design, 1880). Also included in the reprint are sections of a French pattern book, Estoffes de Soie du Japan (originally published ca.1900 by Henri Ernst).