The bad news may be that the exhibition of Japanese paintings that I curated for the Museo d'Arte Orientale, at Torino, scheduled to open next March 26, was postponed by one year. And we just hope that we can enjoy the opening at the Museo delle Culture at Lugano, next July. However, word already spread,…
A friend of mine who always comes with a present handed me this flask gourd saying “I think you can appreciate this.” “I sure can,” I said and thanked him. It obviously belongs to the larger category of objects known as sagemono (提物), items one wants to have at hand but preferably with one’s hands…
Summarizing the conclusions reached in the four preceding parts, we can give a date of 1830 or Tenpō 1 (天保元年) to the so far identified subjects of Nihonbashi (日本橋), Ōji (王子), Sumidagawa (隅田川), Fukagawa (深川), Shibaura (芝浦), Ōhashi (大橋), Mimeguri (三園), Ueno no hana (上野花), and Yanaka (谷中), all picture envelopes, efūto (繪封筒), measuring 191 x 51…
In the foregoing parts we have been investigating four series or groups of prints, two of them comprised of aizurie prints exclusively and two other groups with only a part printed as aizurie. In these four groups, we found three different phrasings of Hokusai’s signature, as follows: Hokusai aratame Iitsu (Hokusai changing his name to…
As far as I know, there are only three more examples of aizuri prints by Hokusai that need to be considered, and then we can try and see whether we can reach a conclusion on our original question: What is the date of the so-called Great Wave? This time we will focus on a group…
In the early 1840s, Kuniyoshi took up the theme of landscape prints again, after some more than five years silence on this front. Alas, for reasons unknown, the project was stopped after only five designs had come out. Was it the poor reaction of the print buying public, or was it beyond the capacity of…
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We are now sufficiently conditioned to automatically add one year whenever we find in older literature that Kunisada died in 1864. Indeed, he died on the 15th day of the Twelfth month of Genji 1 (1864), which corresponds with January 12th 1865 in our Gregorian calendar. Consequently, his dates are 1786-1865. We probably also know…
Many years ago I gave a talk about the earliest Dutch collections of netsuke, as part of the comprehensive collection of Bunsei-Period Japanese artefacts held at the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden. At that time, I had not really asked myself the question how and where Blomhoff (1779-1853, Opperhoofd at Deshima 1817-23), Fisscher (1800-1848, various…