Bowdoin College Museum of Art
News: Acquisitions
Gift of Japanese Prints
- Posted: May 26, 2006
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A kabuki actor committing ritual suicide. An erotic encounter between a couple amidst a jumble of richly patterned robes. An elegant hawk on a snow-laden pine branch. A monk explaining the Buddhist way of life. An early illustration of an episode from the eleventh-century classic novel Tale of Genji.
These are a few of the images from an exciting recent gift of 21 Japanese prints dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. They have been donated by Robert Rothschild and his late wife Maurine who for many years taught Japanese history at the Fieldston School in New York.
Uniformly of excellent quality and great historical interest, these works include examples of very early black and white woodblock printing. Subsequent works introduce color, at first paler and then increasingly more vibrant. One lively example characteristic of prints produced in Yokohama (one of the three treaty ports open to the West) shows a cigar-smoking, bearded Englishman on horseback.
Mr. and Mrs. Rothschild began to purchase Japanese art in the 1960s, primarily in Paris. One print is identified on the back as having once been in the collection of Ernest Fenollosa, the celebrated Boston Brahmin and aficionado of Japanese art and culture who was the first curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Among the celebrated artists immediately identifiable within this group are Hiroshige (1797-1858); Kunisada I (1786-1865) and Kunisada II (1823-1888); Hanabusa (1652-1724); and Utamaro, (1753-1806).
