Aesthetics and Ethnography:

Japan in East Asian collections in Leiden, Milan, The Hague

and Venice

Maria Montcalm

11351799

Museum Studies (Heritage Studies)

Master’s Thesis

Supervisor: Bram Kempers

Second Reader: Charlotte van Rappard-Boon

29-3-2019

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ...... 1 Acknowledgements ...... 2 Introduction ...... 3 Chapter 1: Leiden – International Exhibitions ...... 9 Chapter 2: Milan – Trade and Industry ...... 26 Chapter 3: The Hague – Japonism ...... 39 Chapter 4: Venice – Travel and Diplomacy ...... 53 Conclusion ...... 65 Bibliography ...... 69 Image Credits ...... 72

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Map of the 1883 International Exhibition grounds...... 16 Figure 2. Legend of Exhibition grounds map...... 17 Figure 3. Amida Buddha 1716, bought from Dirk Boer in 1883 (RV-417-81)...... 19 Figure 4. Selection of objects bought from Dirk Boer in 1883. From top left, clockwise: bronze temple lantern (RV-417-104b), bronze elephant surmounted by a pagoda (RV-417-103a), bronze Kannon statuette (RV-417-93), bronze statue of Shozen doji (RV- 417-100), bronze Shishi incense burner (RV-417-107), bronze incense holder in the shape of a cow (RV-417-105-a, RV-417-105-b)...... 20 Figure 5. Buddhas purchased from Bing in 1883. From top left, clockwise: Ichiji Kinrin (RV-418-2), Yakushi Nyorai (RV-418-1), Ichiji Kinrin (RV-418-4), Dainichi Nyorai (RV-418-5). The last three are from the Tokugawa Mausoleum in Zojoji, cast in 1648...... 22 Figure 6. Amida Buddha purchased by Giussani in Yokohama...... 32 Figure 7. Sala dei Bronzi at Castello Sforzesco 1901-1902...... 35 Figure 8. Japansche Zaal/ Salon Japonais at the Grand Royal Bazar. Hendrik Wilhelmus Lust, De Japanse zaal in de Grand Bazar, ca.1854...... 40 Figure 9. Japan-inspired party at Pulchri Studio, The Hague, 1900...... 41 Figure 10. Room in the Mesdag house, 1915...... 43 Figure 11. Eighteenth-century helmet (hwm0552) that was later decorated with an incised silver dragon motif...... 49 Figure 12. Mesdag’s studio...... 50 Figure 13. Count Bardi portrayed as a samurai...... 56 Figure 14. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi...... 58 Figure 15. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi...... 59 Figure 16. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi...... 59 Figure 17. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi...... 60

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this thesis has taken me through many times and places both figuratively and literally. I enjoyed the chance to research the movement of cultural objects from East Asia to Europe over an almost fifty year period straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend a year and a half on this thesis and to have had the opportunity to visit my case study collections in Italy and the Netherlands. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Bram Kempers of the University of Amsterdam, whose patience is only matched by his thoughtful consideration of my work. His insightful critique helped me to focus my writing while encouraging me in the direction of my research. To my second reader, Charlotte van Rappard-Boon with her years of experience working with Japanese collections in the Netherlands, I would like to give thanks for her enthusiasm for my research and for her feedback. I am very grateful for the assistance I received from the institutions which house the collections of my case studies; Museum Volkenkunde where I did my internship, the librarians at the Van Gogh Museum Library who helped me access some hard-to-find sources, and in particular to Claudio Carello, librarian at MUDEC, who directed me to some invaluable resources during my short time in Milan. I appreciate all the support from my family and friends; especially to Irem, Shirin and Valeria who inspired me at the beginning of my research, and to Julie and Robin who gave me the encouragement I needed to finish.

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Introduction

The cultural heritage of Japan holds a unique place in cultural histories. Japanese art history is often taught as the non-European component of art history courses due to its influence during the late nineteenth century. The cultural anthropology of Japan lacks the overt colonial context that taints research into many other cultures. Japanese cultural heritage has the most variety of representation in museums in Europe. Japanese material culture can be displayed in art museums alongside the canon of European art history, in ethnological museums with various cultures from around the world, or in museums dedicated specifically to Asian art and culture. Collection histories are particularly interesting for this subject, because the motivations of the original collectors, and subsequent museum management, can show the trends and vagaries of the representation of Japanese culture. The first direct contact between Europe and Japan was in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1543. Indirect contact had existed before through the Silk Road, but knowledge of the country and culture was scarce in comparison with that of continental Asia. The Portuguese exported crafts and art objects along with raw materials. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch became the sole European traders with Japan, and the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China led to the disruption of Sino-European trade. This was taken advantage of by the Dutch and Japanese with the production of export porcelain and lacquerware to the European market. This first craze for things oriental led to attempts at reproduction through Delftware and the technique of ‘japanning,’ though these efforts did not offset the demand for Japanese products. Throughout the eighteenth century, porcelain and lacquered furnishings became de rigueur for grand houses, however in this period Chinese kilns and production centres had regained their strength and Japanese exports declined. Such objects for domestic ornamentation were associated with China and the fashion for oriental design became known as chinoiserie. The pendulum of taste swung away from chinoiserie by the mid-nineteenth century, with Neoclassicism and Romanticism replacing such Rococo-associated styles. The prestige of China was also devalued politically and economically through its defeat in the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). Chinese and Japanese decorative objects continued to be imported in the name of ornamentation. In the rest of the world, objects of everyday life and of traditional culture were being collected first by missionaries, and then later by naturalists who collected manmade objects along with specimens from the natural world. In the nineteenth century, collecting for research or scientific purposes emerged from the

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Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm philosophies of the Enlightenment, and ethnology developed as a discipline which was closely tied to the ethnographic collections formed by European explorers of newly- accessible lands. This is the historical context leading up to the opening of Japan to diplomatic and trade relations with the USA and European states in the 1850s. The sudden international influence brought about domestic political changes, with political power being restored to the emperor and the feudal system replaced by a centralized government. During the reign of the Meiji emperor (1868-1912), economic and artistic exports increased, and ethnographic study occurred mainly through published travel diaries and collections formed by visitors. Artistic exports brought on an obsession with Japanese designs and patterns, known as Japonism. This fascination influenced the artistic avant-garde, as well as theatre and garden design. The cultural context, in both scientific and artistic circles, influenced collection interests and reception of Japanese material culture. A look at the museums in which Japanese material culture is present in Europe today, shows great variation in the type of museum, and yet there can be much overlap in terms of content. During this sudden influx of Japanese material culture, how was it represented in European museums of ethnography and art? How does this representation compare to that of collections from other East Asian cultures? To what extent did contemporary socio-political contexts influence the formation and musealization of four case study collections? How were collecting practices motivated by aesthetic or ethnographic interest? What patterns of musealization emerged during this time of unprecedented access to Japan? In particular, what was the rationale for the division of Japanese material culture into art or ethnography? The focus here is on Japanese culture, but the contextualization of Japan in relation to China and Korea is necessary to avoid Japanese exceptionalism. Japanese material culture is often part of larger East Asian collections, whether in an art or ethnographic context. Through examination of the histories of the collectors, display and musealization of certain case study institutions, it will be attempted to situate Japanese cultural heritage within the contexts of East Asian collections in European museums of ethnography and art. The composition and display of the chosen collections will be analysed using literary sources and images, and contextualized through the investigation of the political and social backgrounds of the Asian and European countries involved. The approach is historical, which focuses on the empirical evidence available, and from which the theoretical framework is based. It is necessary to acknowledge and engage with the post-colonial discourses that shape present historical interpretations of Europe’s dealings with other cultures. The shadow of Orientalism 4

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm hangs over any attempt to analyse relations between Europe and cultures situated (but not limited) to its East. This research is orientalist in nature because the focus is not on the history or meaning of objects within Japanese culture, but on how they were received and treated in Europe. Artistic re-imaginings of Japanese culture will not be dealt with here, but the reception and construction of Asian cultural identities through exhibition and display is a significant part of the collection process. Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism (1979) explored the colonial and imperial subtext of Western academic studies and artistic interest in the East. The Orient described in Said’s book encompassed the Islamic world of the Middle East and North Africa. In the decades since, his ideas have been extended to refer to all of Asia and beyond to draw attention to the dichotomy between the West as the observer, and ‘the rest’ as the observed. Through the prism of Orientalism, the observed, the observer and the subtleties in their interrelation can be better explored. It is in this way that with the examination of the political, economic and cultural context of the collectors and the objects, we can find the influence of colonial perspectives and self-orientalization in the relations between the collectors and collected. Orientalism when applied to Japan requires recognition of the context which differentiates it from the original Middle Eastern ‘Orient’ analysed by Said. There are important distinctions to be made between the reception of the cultures of colonized lands in the Middle East and Southern Asia, to those in East Asia without the overt colonial context. While it could be argued that both colonialism and imperialism reflect the same mind-set of domination and superiority, the nuances in power relations have a significant effect. In this regard, MacKenzie responded to Said’s Orientalism in his own publication Orientalism (1995), by cautioning against a similar ‘Occidentalist’ view of Western culture as an exclusively imperialist, exploitative force against an oppressed and impotent Orient. The concept of Orientalism is a tool to acknowledge the power-imbalances and the implicit sense of superiority that characterizes Western interaction with the East. Within this concept, the nuances of particular East-West relations should be recognized and explored. The different context of Japan does not entail exceptionalism, but instead should reinforce the fact that the Orient of Orientalism is also not a monolith. Japonism is notable for its early acknowledgement of a preoccupation with a particular discrete Asian culture. While ‘chinoiserie’ referred to a taste for decoration in a delicate Chinese or generally Asian style, it lacked the deeper interest in the culture of origin that characterized Japonism. The popularity of this term should not eclipse the fact, however, that objects from other Eastern cultures 5

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm were being collected in a similar manner, from Middle Eastern ceramics to Southeast Asian sculptures. Japonism is associated with the art world, and refers to the Western inspiration from Japan in artistic production, and in the collection of Japanese objects. The scope of this study does not include Japonist art, however insightful that can be to the Western perception of Japan. It focuses on the collections of Japanese objects that were formed in Europe, and what these can illustrate about the relationship between the collectors and the collected. Japonism is often described as the craze for all things Japanese, and this study explores that idea through the concepts of aesthetics and ethnography as motivations for collecting. These key concepts are born from the two most common types of museums in which Japanese material culture can be found in Europe today. Art museums collect objects of artistic production for aesthetic appreciation. Ethnographic and ethnological museums collect a wide variety of objects designed for various purposes in order to convey information about a particular culture. The motivations behind the collecting practices of the museums or first collectors can be analysed through these concepts as a way to track the representation of the material collected. Aesthetics is broader than art as a concept, which is necessary to explore late nineteenth century collecting in Europe, when the Arts and Crafts Movement was attempting to bridge the divide between objects produced for art's sake and those for an ornamental or decorative function. Through aesthetics, collectors could appreciate only the physical aspects of objects, in the absence of contextual information such as its function or meaning. Ethnography is the description of the culture of a particular group of people, and it involves the research method of fieldwork to give empirical data. Ethnology can encompass ethnography as it studies and compares groups of peoples. Museums designated ethnographic or ethnological are often in practice interchangeable, as the museums can, through research and exhibition, practice both ethnography and ethnology. In The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures (1997), Lidchi explores the idea of an ethnographic museum. The disciplines of ethnography and ethnology come under the science of anthropology, but those disciplines grew out of ethnographic and ethnological collections in museums in the nineteenth century. Interest in other cultures brought together ethnographic collections before the discipline was formalized. Ethnography has an association with the indigenous cultures of Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, due to the collections formed from European exploration and colonization of these areas in the nineteenth century. The concept of ethnographic interests provides a foil for aesthetic interests when examining the creation of the collections in the case studies. As a contrast and complement to the appreciation of 6

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material culture purely for its physical characteristics, ethnographic interest can show how the understanding of the culture of origin played a part in an object's selection and representation. Focusing on ethnography as a concept allows for greater emphasis on the Japanese collections, but ethnological interest is also a factor for collections which contain objects of multiple cultures. The crux of this research looks into the European perception of Japanese cultural heritage, however, it is imperative to locate this focus within the East Asian context. As will be seen from collection analyses, Japanese objects usually formed only part of a collection, often including other Asian cultural heritage. Neighbouring cultures were often present, and it is significant to note whether the connections in the collection come from original ties in Asia, or were created in Europe through Orientalist perspectives. The second half of the nineteenth century brought enormous changes to the historic relationships between Japan, China and Korea, and it should be borne in mind that these changes can be found in Western perceptions of Asia at the time. During the Meiji period, the Qing dynasty of China, weakened by the Opium Wars was attempting to modernize during the Self-Strengthening Movement. However, its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 further weakened it and led to the establishment of a Republic and the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912. The Joseon dynasty of Korea was caught between its traditional status as a tributary state of the Chinese Empire, and the new-found international influence of the modernized Japanese Empire. The temporal scope of the Meiji period for this study allows for the focus on collections formed when Japan became accessible to many Europeans. During this time the new Japanese government was actively recruiting foreign professionals to industrialize its economy and introduce new technology, and it was also promoting its manufactures abroad through international exhibitions. Over this forty-four year reign, much changed politically, economically and culturally, but the export and collection of Japanese art and artefacts continued steadily until the First World War. The case studies are taken from the Netherlands and Italy, countries on the periphery of the economic might of Britain and the cradle of Japonism in Paris. The United States was a major player culturally and diplomatically in Japan’s foreign relations, however by focusing on collections outside the major centres of Japanese interest, the strongest currents of thought about Japanese material culture can be identified. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands was still the only European power with access to acquire Japanese (and Korean) objects directly. The collections formed then remained at the heart of Dutch East Asian collections at the end of 7

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the century in the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden. By then, the Netherlands no longer had the European monopoly on Japanese goods and was focusing on extending its colonies in Southeast Asia. In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century, collectors of newly-unified Italy, joined the rest of Europe in collecting artefacts and objets d'art from East Asia, such as those that were added to the Non-European Collections in Milan. The Japanese collections of certain collectors were eventually formed into individual museums. A relatively unknown private Asian collection is contained within the Mesdag Collection in The Hague, a museum which is most known for Mesdag’s collection of nineteenth-century European painting. In Venice, the collection of Count Bardi of Bourbon which today forms the Museum of Oriental Art, was the result of a round-the-world trip. After his death it was bought by the state to become an art museum. Studying the modus operandi of these amateur collectors, with no scholarly or professional connection to Japan, can provide some insight into general practices of European collectors of Asian artefacts during the Meiji era. One of these case studies alone could be analysed for its representation of Japanese culture by art or ethnography, and as will be seen, the distinction between the two areas of interest was not definite. The purpose of the examination of four case studies from four cities is to establish patterns of collection and musealization in a broad sense. This breadth necessitates an overview of the collections, based on the research that has already been carried out, in order to build up a larger picture of collection trends in the time period and places in question. The chapters are arranged in an approximate chronological order based on their musealization. The Japanese works acquired by the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden were added to the longest-standing museum. The Non-European Collections in Milan and the Mesdag Collection were compiled with the intent to be publically displayed in newly- established museums. The Bardi collection, on the other hand, had a much slower musealization process, becoming its own museum only in the 1920s, yet parts being sold in the decades prior to enrich other museum collections.

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Chapter 1: Leiden – International Exhibitions

The National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden today contains objects from five continents, but it was born from collections of the first half of the nineteenth century with a focus on East Asia, as the National Museum of Ethnography. These founding pre-Meiji collections had a decisive role in later acquisition policies, so it is worthwhile to evaluate them briefly in order to contextualize the Meiji-era additions to a historically rich collection. It also serves to give a background in the general European context. Since the seventeenth century, porcelain, lacquerware and silk were imported from East Asia to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and then on to the rest of Europe for use in furnishing and fashion. In addition to this trade in luxury goods, the direct personal connections between buyers at home and traders in Asia created the basis for a scholarly interest in those cultures. The museum is now noted for its extensive and rich Japanese collection, but the oldest collection is Chinese. This eighteenth century collection contains more than the ceramics and lacquerware which might place it in the category of chinoiserie. The jurist Jean Theodore Royer from The Hague (1737-1807) was a sinologist, as well as an antiquarian and print collector, and his erudition on Chinese culture gave his collection a scholastic disposition in comparison to other collections of Asian objects. He collected works in metal, writing implements, paintings, musical instruments, clothes, medicines and household objects. The ceramics and lacquerware also included objects of Japanese origin, so despite scholarly knowledge, there may not have been a hard distinction between the cultures. His object collection was complemented by his library of Chinese books and contemporary prints and paintings of China, which he mostly procured through contacts on the Dutch Trading Post in Canton. After his death, his collection was given to the first King of the Netherlands, William I. It was known as the Cabinet of Chinese Rarities in 1816 and became the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in 1823 with the addition of other collections and relocation to the Mauritshuis. When the Royal Cabinet of Rarities was closed, much of the Royer collection went to the then Museum of Ethnography, but parts were sent to the Rijksmuseum, and also given in trades for other objects.1 Another collector, later than Royer, is considered to be the founder of the museum as an ethnographical institution. Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) was a German doctor who worked on the Dutch Trading Post of Dejima, Japan, from 1823-1829. He collected local

1 Rudolf Effert, Royal cabinets and auxiliary branches: origins of the National Museum of Ethnology, 1816-1883 (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2008), 235-236. 9

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flora and fauna as well as ethnographic objects, and the botanical and zoological collections were given to museums of their respective disciplines. His studies and collections reflect the ideals of the Enlightenment, with knowledge being pursued across what would later become separate disciplines. His ethnographic collection is notable for his attempt at systematic classification in the manner of botany and zoology. The ethnographic collection of approximately 5,000 objects which he amassed in Japan during these years remains very important today, as it was one of only a few Dutch collections of contemporary Edo-period objects. By 1832, Von Siebold’s collection was on public display in his house in Leiden and was arguably the world’s earliest collection to be organised ethnographically.2 The collection was divided into four classes - scientific objects, objects of culture and industry, models and ethnographic objects from other areas. The scientific class contained printed books and manuscripts, drawings and paintings, and coins and medals. Objects of culture and industry included raw materials, products made from a single material, and products made from combinations of materials. The models showed buildings, furniture, tools and instruments. Many of the objects in the collection were specifically commissioned by Von Siebold to record aspects of Japanese material culture, such as the models of Japanese houses which included all the implements and furniture used in daily life. The painter Kawahara Keiga made documentary images of local scenes and objects which was included in the collection, but also classed separately from the physical objects. The collection was displayed in Leiden based on Von Siebold’s classification system, and this approach was a departure in how collections from outside Europe had been traditionally displayed for their exoticism and beauty. An intermediate system did exist in the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague. Formed in 1816, it incorporated the collections of Jan Cock Blomhoff (on Dejima 1813-1823) and Johannes Frederik van Overmeer Fisscher (on Dejima 1819-1830) into its displays of European examples of crafts and rarities. Blomhoff and Fisscher lived on Dejima before or at the same time as Von Siebold, and both had made catalogues of their collections in order for them to be purchased by the King for the Cabinet. Von Siebold may have been influenced by their systems of classifying objects by material, function and social context.

2 However by today’s standards Von Siebold’s classification system was not purely anthropological. See Ken Vos, “The Composition of the Siebold Collection in the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden,” Senri Ethnological Studies 54, (March 2001): 46. 10

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These three collections remain important for research into early-nineteenth-century Japan, particularly of the Bunsei Era (1818-1830), and continue to be used for historical research today by Japanese scholars. They are also a legacy of the cultural policies at the commencement of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, as the collections of Blomhoff and Fisscher were acquired, not out of personal interest, but on the request of the head of state. Even Von Siebold’s collection, though a private endeavour, was acquired with the idea of eventually being united with the other two collections, and becoming a national ethnographic museum.3 The attention given to studies of Japan in particular at this time is surprising in the context of Dutch colonial expansion in the Indonesian archipelago with the 1800 nationalization of the Dutch East India Company. However, it can be understood as an expression of national pride as the only European country with a trade link to Japan. In 1838 Von Siebold reached an agreement with the Dutch State to nationalize his collection, and by 1859 when he returned to Japan, it was known as the Rijks Japans Museum Von Siebold (National Japanese Museum Von Siebold).4 In that same year, the Indonesian ethnographic collection of Salomon Müller was added to the Siebold collection.5 The museum was renamed in 1862 as the Rijks Ethnografisch Museum (National Museum of Ethnography), and two years later the Indonesian collection of the Royal Academy in Delft was added. From then on, the museum was more closely connected to Leiden University, whose curators focused their interests on objects from the colonies. Despite its academic ties, the museum was not yet considered a scientific institution in the same way as the National Museum of Natural History.6 It was not the only ethnographic museum in the Netherlands; in 1861 the zoological society Natura Artis Magistra in Amsterdam opened a museum for its ethnographical collections, in 1871 the Colonial Museum opened in Haarlem, and in 1885 the Museum of Geography and Ethnology opened in Rotterdam. These private or civic museums focused mainly on Dutch colonial territories, and despite the Leiden museum’s colonial acquisitions, it remained distinguished by its Japanese collection. Since the departure of Von Siebold in 1859, management of the museum was undertaken by Conradus Leemans, director of the National Museum of Antiquities. When, in 1860, 29 crates arrived in the Netherlands from the shogun of Japan, Leemans advised on the

3 Von Siebold submitted his first proposal for the establishment of an ethnographic museum in 1834. See Effert, Royal cabinets, 152. 4 H.S. van der Straaten, “Van testament tot ‘Volkenkunde,’” Verre naasten naderbij 3, no. 1 (1969): 22. 5 Effert, Royal cabinets, 176. 6 Effert, Royal cabinets, 174. 11

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distribution of the contents of the crates, and they were exhibited in Leiden’s town auditorium as objects of art and industry. The crates contained silk room screens, silks, porcelain and paper. Some of the screens and porcelain were taken directly into the museum, while samples were taken of the silks for display, and the paper and rest of the silk could be used for restorative and decorative purposes.7 In addition to these purposes within the museum itself, the objects were a lucrative asset for barter trade with other museums in Europe. Although the Meiji period brought about an increase in the exploitation of Japanese artistic and industrial products as a diplomatic tool, it should be kept in mind that this was also the case during the Bakumatsu, or end of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1853-1867). Japan first actively participated in an International Exhibition in 1867 at the Paris Exposition Universelle. This was a reaction to the 1862 London International Exhibition which was visited by the First Japanese Embassy to Europe. Rutherford Alcock, the first British diplomatic representative to Japan, had arranged the Japanese section, and Takashima Yūkei lamented the inclusion of such pre-industrial products as paper lanterns and umbrellas, and straw raincoats and shoes.8 A comparison between the objects sent to the Netherlands in 1860 and the reaction to those displayed in London in 1862, shows that there were standards in Japan of high quality and low quality crafts. The Meiji government would later build upon the shogunate's efforts to represent its material culture as equal to that of European cultures, but unique rather than simply curious. Ten years after the Meiji Restoration, in August 1878, the Japanese minister Matsuoka visited the museum in Leiden and promised to send objects from the Paris World's Fair of that year. From December of that year until January of the following, 70 crates of mainly industrial products and raw materials arrived. The majority of the acquisitions until 1883 were donations. During Leeman's time, the collection grew by 5,000 to 34,000 total in 1883. The majority of the collection was still from the Far East with 14,000 objects from Japan and China, followed by 12,000 from Indonesia. Collections from New Guinea and the South Seas contained 2,000 objects, and there were also 700 objects from Suriname. In 1883 the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in the Mauritshuis was finally closed due to lack of sufficient space and funds for upkeep. The collections were split and sent to various museums in the Netherlands, with objects deemed to be ethnographic sent to the Museum of

7 Effert, Royal cabinets, 192-3. 8 Angus Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition, 1867-1877: From Representation to Practice,” Senri Ethnological Studies 54, (March 2001): 70. 12

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Ethnography, and those with artistic value to what would become the Rijksmuseum.9 Objects were also sent to the Museum of Natural History, The Museum of Antiquities, the National Mineral-Geological Museum, and the National Herbarium, showing that by this time academic disciplines had shaped museums, and the universalist approach of Kunstkabinetten was no longer acceptable. The division of the collection brought up the same issues that are at the heart of this thesis - what is art and what is ethnography? In 1877 Leemans had employed japanologist Lindor Serrurier as conservator, who then took over as director of the museum in 1880. David van der Kellen, who together with Serrieur was in charge of the division of the collection, wrote that they had come to the agreement that ethnographic objects were those “which could effectively increase the knowledge of the morals, the customs, the character, etc., etc., of the peoples living outside of Europe, with the exception of the objects which belong more directly to the fields of art and industrial arts.”10 This definition could not adequately inform the division, and it was a matter of personal and professional negotiations to arrange the split. Serrurier drew up the initial classification to which Van der Kellen made some amendments. The Fisscher collection was kept mostly intact and sent to Leiden, as was the majority of the Blomhoff collection. Japanese objects which showed Dutch influence, such as a writing desk and a lacquer case for a Dutch pipe, were not considered representative of Japanese culture. Despite considering the Blomhoff collection very important ethnographically, Serrurier set apart certain objects from the Blomhoff collection as being more suited for a museum of industrial arts, such as items from the categories of sculpture, leatherwork, woodwork, stonework, ceramics, lacquerware and basketry. In total, approximately 7,100 objects from the Royal Cabinet were transferred to the Museum of Ethnography.11 1883 continued to be an important year of Japanese acquisitions, thanks to the International Colonial and Export Exhibition which took place in Amsterdam over the course of six months. This was the first international exposition to have an explicitly colonial focus, and to emphasize the trade rather than manufacture of industrial products.12 Whereas previous international expositions had a universal approach to the subjects of art, industry and technology, the exhibition in Amsterdam looked specifically at how the colonies could contribute to European development. It was an international production from the beginning

9 Marika Keblusek, Japansch magazijn: Japanse kunst en cultuur in 19de-eeuws Den Haag, (Leiden: Hotei Pub., 2000), 16. 10 Effert, Royal cabinets, 236. 11 Effert, Royal cabinets, 232-235. 12 Erik Mattie, World's Fairs, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 60. 13

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when the idea was proposed to the king and important figures in Amsterdam by the Frenchman Edouard Agostini in 1880. Agostini had been involved in the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, and he became the chief commissioner of the Amsterdam Exhibition. The city council granted the site of museum square as the location of the exhibition. The Rijksmuseum was still undergoing construction, and this building was also used as an exhibition location. This exhibition was part of the trend of International Exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The phenomenon was born out of the national exhibitions held in France in the first half of the century, and grew to enormous importance as a way to exhibit products of industrialization and colonization. In ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Culture,’ Timothy Mitchell cites world exhibitions as one of the methods through which Orientalist reality was constructed.13 National identity was constructed and reinforced through the exhibition of physical manifestations of its economic and social sectors, and in opposition to the “otherness” of the non-Western world exhibited there. The orderliness of the exhibition reflected the efforts of the colonial powers to organize the world according to their own systems. Japan was present at the first International Exhibition in London before it was unofficially opened to the West with the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ships in 1853, but little attention was paid to the Japanese objects displayed as part of the Chinese section.14 By contrast, the Japan exhibit assembled by the British consul Rutherford Alcock attracted a lot of attention at the 1862 World Fair in London. The political and economic changes in Japanese society can be outlined through the changing authorities and methods of exhibition at the World's Fairs. In 1867, a year before the Meiji Restoration, Japan was represented not only by the Tokugawa shogunate, but also by the Satsuma and Tosa domains. This was an indicator of the instability of the shogunal government in these years, and undermined the shogun's status internationally. By the 1878 exhibition in Paris, the Meiji government had strong control over its cultural and industrial representation. Japan participated as an attempt to both situate itself on the same political level as other European and American powers and to advertise the wares produced by its newly-industrialized economy. From 1872, exhibitions of Japanese products aimed at foreigners were held at Buddhist temples in Kyoto, as well as at the Imperial Palace. After the success of the 1873 Vienna’s World Fair, the Kiritsu Kōsho Kaisha was set up by

13 Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the exhibitionary order,” in Colonialism and culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992), 289-318. 14 MacKenzie, Orientalism, 124. 14

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the government to be able to sell the products displayed there. It then began to organize the production of crafts and artworks for export, and under the direction of its vice-president Wakai Kenzaburō, its products were displayed at the 1878 exhibition to great acclaim. The zenith of admiration for Japan came at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with the exhibition of artworks from the Imperial collections. In this exhibition Europeans could see paintings and sculpture that revealed the long tradition of Japanese art, older than had been thought. This discovery demonstrated that Japan had a classical art tradition which fulfilled Western expectations of ‘fine art.’ In his Souvenirs thirty years later, journalist and collector Raymond Koechlin lamented that this was “the opportunity to appreciate [Japan’s] treasures as never before and, as it happens, never since.”15 The participation of Japan at the 1883 exhibition was not as prominent as in the exhibitions previously mentioned, and its representation was mostly due to the presence of collections of European art dealers and collectors. The Dutch government was involved in inviting other states to participate in the exhibition. The guest-nations with the largest presence were Belgium, France and Germany, but a great many large and small nations participated, from the United States to Russia, and Uruguay to the Transvaal (see Figs. 1 and 2). The Chinese and Japanese sections were of comparable size or larger than many of those belonging to the other participants. There were also bazaars selling Eastern goods – one Turkish, one Chinese and two Japanese. China had official representatives, with a three-man delegation present at the Exhibition opening, who stayed in Amsterdam for several weeks.16 The Chinese ambassador in Berlin, Li Fong Pao had a room reserved in the Chinese house exhibited within the grounds, not as part of the exhibition but as a mark of honour.17

15 Max Put, Philippe Sichel, and Raymond Koechlin, Plunder and pleasure: Japanese art in the West, 1860-1930, (Leiden: Hotei Pub, 2000), 88. 16 Ileen Montijn, Kermis van Koophandel: de Amsterdamse wereldtentoonstelling van 1883, (Bussum: Van Holkema & Warendord, 1883), 14. 17 Montijn, Kermis van Koophandel, 28. 15

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

Figure 1. Map of the 1883 International Exhibition grounds.

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Figure 2. Legend of Exhibition grounds map.

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The representations of autonomous states and of protectorates and colonies of other European participants were very different to the representations of the Dutch colonies. These latter were represented through ‘kampong’ and colonial parks constructed for the indigenous people from the West and East Indies. This open-air museum of furnished houses from different parts of Indonesia was displayed after the Exhibition at the Museum of Ethnography. The 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris had contained a park beside the exhibition hall, where spectators could ‘visit’ various, faraway lands, such as Italy, Egypt and China. In the park, Japan had exhibited a teahouse constructed with imported materials, where three geisha sat on display to the public. At the 1883 exhibition, only the Dutch colonies were exhibited in such a manner. This colonial practice grew more common in International Exhibitions in the early twentieth century, and was engaged in by Japan as a colonial power. At the 1904 St Louis World Fair, Japan exhibited Ainu people from the northernmost island of Hokkaido, which under the Meiji government was developed and colonized as a way to prevent the encroachment of Russia through Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. European Japanese collections were displayed in an ethnographic exhibition in the unfinished building of the Rijksmuseum on the north of the square. This was also the location of displays of antique Dutch furniture and crafts in period rooms, as befitting the future national museum. The central court housed the ethnographic exhibition of mostly international loans, which was organised by Serrurier. The exhibition as planned was envisaged with five sections divided into British India and Persia (I), Hindu and Buddhist objects (II), China and Japan (III), historic ethnographic collections (IV) and the comparative ethnology collection of Augustus Pitt Rivers (V). In fact, not all the sections could be realized, because some of the international lenders reneged, and so sections II and IV lacked the important collections of Belgian and French lenders (including Émile Guimet). The exhibition did receive generous loans from the South Kensington Museum and from Pitt Rivers, which demonstrates the overlap between design and archaeology in many ethnographic displays. Japan may have had some influence over the presentation of its culture in the ethnographic exhibition. In the foreword of his catalogue, Serrurier thanked a Mr Otsoeka, a member of the Japanese commission of the International Exhibition.18 It is unclear if there were other national commissions for the exhibition, but it is clear from Serrurier’s acknowledgements that Mr Otsoeka was the only representative of a culture displayed

18 Lindor Serrurier, Catalogus der ethnographische afdeeling van de internationale Koloniale en uitvoerhandel teutoonstelling, (Leiden: Brill., 1883) 7. 18

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm ethnographically to be personally thanked. Within the catalogue entries however, the references are entirely to Western scholars. The catalogue of the Guimet Museum was referenced with respect to the Buddhist objects on display. This museum of religions, opened in Lyon in 1879, was very influential in collecting trends at the end of the nineteenth century. The study of religious objects added a serious dimension to Asian collections, especially as the antiquity of the religion-based cultures was gradually understood through archaeological finds in the early twentieth century. The Chinese and Japanese objects in Section III came from dealers and private collectors. The private collections mainly consisted of small objects that were displayed in cabinets; lacquered boxes, Satsuma stoneware, weapons, masks, overglazed vases, netsuke and incense burners. Two of the well-known collectors were Anthonius Franciscus Bauduin from The Hague who had been a professor of medicine in Japan between 1863-1870, and Johan Wilhelm van Lansberge from Brummen who was Governor-general of the Dutch East Indies from 1875 to 1881. The main dealers exhibiting were Dirk Boer of The Hague, who displayed thirty-six objects and Siegfried Bing of Paris, who displayed six. In these instances, the exhibited objects were large Buddha sculptures and temple decorations, dating mostly from the nineteenth century. Boer’s submission included six bronze temple lanterns, four bronze elephants surmounted by pagodas, seven life-size bronze Buddha statues, ten smaller kannon statues, two gilt wooden temple images, a Chinese-style bronze sculpture of a warrior, two bronze incense burners in the form of shishi (mythical lion-dogs), and a bronze incense burner with a cow as a base (see Figs. 3 and 4).

Figure 3. Amida Buddha 1716, bought from Dirk Boer in 1883 (RV-417-81).

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Figure 4. Selection of objects bought from Dirk Boer in 1883. From top left, clockwise: bronze temple lantern (RV-417- 104b), bronze elephant surmounted by a pagoda (RV-417-103a), bronze Kannon statuette (RV-417-93), bronze statue of Shozen doji (RV-417-100), bronze Shishi incense burner (RV-417-107), bronze incense holder in the shape of a cow (RV-417-105-a, RV-417-105-b). This exhibition did not attract as many visitors as was hoped, but it was very important for the National Ethnographic Museum in its acquisitions of Japanese and Chinese objects. The dealers’ exhibits in the court of the exhibition were evidently for sale, with each article having its own label which included a price. The museum was particularly interested in the Buddhist sculptures on offer from the dealers, as their collections lacked many religious objects. Although the Japanese collections were rich with many aspects of local culture, the export of religious objects had been forbidden by the Tokugawa government and so were unavailable to those early collectors. The museum was aware of the great Buddhist collections in France collected recently by Guimet and Henri Cernuschi. Guimet, whose museum was still based in Lyon at this time, had been invited to display his collection at the exposition, but it did not come to pass.

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The reason for this comparative influx of Buddhist objects has much to do with the political and social changes happening in Japan during the early Meiji period. With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Kami and Buddhas Separation Order was enacted to separate what had heretofore been the syncretic religions of native Shinto belief and Buddhism. Since the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century, there had been tendencies to view the religion with suspicion and xenophobia. Throughout the centuries, Buddhism and kami worship had become amalgamated, with shrines located in temples and vice versa. The order to separate the two belief systems was done to further demarcate the new government. Buddhism had become associated with the Tokugawa shogunate through the Edo period, and the legend of the emperor’s lineage made him a descendant of a kami, so State Shinto was to become the main religion. Though the order did not call for the closure of temples and the destruction of Buddhist property, it did fuel the violent activities of the haibutsu kishaku anti-Buddhist movement. Until about 1874, tens of thousands of Buddhist temples were closed, and its valuable objects destroyed, removed or sold. In 1871, a few years after the order, the government already recognized the danger to the Japanese identity in the eradication of centuries of Buddhist heritage, and initiated a Plan for the Preservation of Ancient Artefacts, which called for temples, shrines and the newly created prefectures taking over from the old feudal domains, to compile lists of important cultural objects. In the 1880s and 1890s the government was providing funds to temples as well as shrines for their preservation, culminating in the 1897 Ancient Temples and Shrines Preservation Law.19 The 1870s were an opportune time for the acquisition of Japanese Buddhist objects, which was taken advantage of by Henri Cernuschi on his voyage in 1871, and by Émile Guimet in 1876-1877. Objects were also bought by dealers in Japan and sold back to Europe, as was likely the case with the Buddha statues exhibited by Bing in the 1883 Exhibition. Three of the statues originated from the mausoleum of the Tokugawa shogun in Zōjōji Temple.20 These statues were cast in 1648 and donated to the temple by a couple in the Province of Ise. The availability of these statues is very significant, as it represents the end of the influence and importance of the culture associated with the previous government. These statues were likely bought in Japan by Heinrich von Siebold, the son of Philipp Franz von Siebold. Heinrich was working in Japan as an interpreter for the Austrian Embassy and as a

19 Kate Fitz Gibbon, Who owns the past ?: cultural policy, cultural property, and the law, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 331. 20 RV-418-1 Yakushi Nyorai, RV-418-4 Ichiji Kinrin, RV-418-5 Dainichi Nyorai. See Fig. 5. 21

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm collector for museums in Vienna. The Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna acquired part of the interior of the temple from Heinrich von Siebold, so it is likely then that Bing acquired the Buddha statues from him.21 Dirk Boer of The Hague probably purchased his Buddha statues and temple decorations via intermediary dealers, as he himself never travelled to Japan.

Figure 5. Buddhas purchased from Bing in 1883. From top left, clockwise: Ichiji Kinrin (RV-418-2), Yakushi Nyorai (RV-418-1), Ichiji Kinrin (RV-418-4), Dainichi Nyorai (RV-418-5). The last three are from the Tokugawa Mausoleum in Zojoji, cast in 1648. The Museum of Ethnography was keen to increase its collection of religious objects, but did not have the funds to purchase the objects on display independently. Serrurier approached the state for assistance to buy “such a beautiful and renowned collection of

21 “Yakushi Nyorai, RV-418-1,” National Museum of World Cultures, accessed 20 March 2019, collectie.wereldculturen.nl. 22

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

Japanese ethnographic objects related to religion.”22 The state agreed to provide an interest- free loan of 10,000 guilders to purchase Boer’s Buddhist bronzes.23 A further 3,500 guilders for Bing’s six bronzes was advanced by three friends of the museum; Abraham Carel Wertheim (a banker and supporter of the arts), Victor de Stuers and Pierre Cuypers (both involved in the design and construction of the Rijksmuseum).24 Two of the objects purchased from Boer, a pair of bronze elephants surmounted by pagodas (see Fig. 4), may have been those seen by the French art dealer Philippe Sichel during his visit to Japan in 1874, which he described as “hideous,” perhaps explaining the lack of interest from French art dealers.25 The provenance of the Buddha statues from Bing was not completely understood until 1897, when Johann Schmeltz, conservator of the Japanese collection, became director. He was a friend of Justus Brinckmann of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, and he invited Brickmann's assistant Shinkichi Hara to Leiden in order to decipher the inscriptions which gave their dates. From 1900 the Buddha group was displayed in the garden of the museum, where they became very popular with visitors. Notwithstanding some objects donated or bought from Boer later, the Buddha statues proved to be the last major acquisition for the Japanese collection.26 The museum did receive significant donations for the Korean collection during this time. The Blomhoff and Von Siebold collections contained the earliest Korean objects in Europe, bought or received as gifts from Korean traders or fishermen in Nagasaki. Nothing more entered the museum until the 1880s, with the acquisition of a collection of everyday objects such as clothes and accessories belonging to entomologist Alfred Otto Herz in 1885, the donation of a similar collection in 1886 from J. Rhein, an interpreter in Beijing, and who also donated a further collection of paintings in 1888. This was the same year of the receipt of a large collection containing objects of everyday life as well as of courtly life from Friedrich Kraus who assisted in the establishment of the Royal Korean Mint.27 The Netherlands did not

22 “[Z]oo schoone en beroemde verzameling van Japansche ethnografische voorwerpen tot den godsdienst betrekkelijk.” Letter from the National Museum of Ethnography to the Minister of the Interior, September 1883. H. S. van der Straaten, “Beelden komen tot leven,” Verre naasten naderbij 3, no. 3 (1969): 67. 23 This loan was repaid slowly through instalments over 15 years, due to continued problems with the museum's housing, and due to tensions between Serrurier and the state. Straaten, “Beelden komen tot leven,” 68. 24 Keblusek, Japansch magazijn, 61. 25 RV-417-103a, RV-417-103b. See note 15 in Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 50. 26 For prints: Gratama (1886), Brill of Leiden (1896), Wagner of Berlin (1901). For sword guards: Kleykamp (1901), Rex & Co. of Berlin (1901). Museum Volkenkunde Leiden, De Mens in Beeld: Verzamelde Collectieprofielen, (2008), 79. 27 Elmer Veldkamp, Kim Donghyon, and Nam Eunsil, The Korean collection of Museum Volkenkunde, (Seoul: Overseas Korean Cultural heritage Foundation, 2016), 37. 23

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

have much contact with Korea at this time, and so these additions were thanks to the museum’s connections with German ethnographers. In comparison to its neighbours, there is a dearth of information regarding the collecting of Korean artefacts, and it is often buried within discussions of Japanese or Chinese collections.28 The ‘Hermit Kingdom’ eschewed almost all international contact, restricting trade with Japan to the island of Tsushima and in Busan, and keeping a tributary state status in relation to China. With the waning influence of China in the region, Japan was the first foreign power to successfully compel Korea to agree to official diplomacy and trade in 1876. Korean ceramics were present at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, but in the retrospective exhibition of Oriental ceramics as part of the collection of Wakai Kenzaburō. At the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, Korea had its own pavilion, though it was then organized by two Frenchmen. An observer, despite not holding the modern Korean ceramics in high regard, remarked on the very high esteem in which they were held by Japanese collectors.29 The exhibit also contained mannequin displays of costumes and photographs of modern streets with electrical wires and trams, adding an ethnographic element. In the following decades the museum followed the other Dutch ethnographic museums by increasing its holdings from the colonies and from underrepresented parts of the world. From 1903 to 1904 the large Hindu-Javanese statues from the National Museum of Antiquities were transferred to the National Museum of Ethnography, which distinguished its Dutch Indies collection, giving it a prominence that had heretofore been claimed by the Japanese collection. There was a lack of knowledge of the existence of ancient Japanese material culture, as there was in the rest of Europe, but there was also a disinterest in the fine arts of Japan. The division of the Cabinet of Rarities into art and ethnography defined the Japanese collection for the museum. The large Buddha statues were not bought as examples of Japanese sculpture, but as meaningful representations of Japanese religion. The purpose of this purchase should also be offset against its display outdoors in the garden; not an ethnographic installation in the way of the East Indian kampong, with aesthetic echoes of a garden of classical sculpture. The Japanese collections of the National Museum of Ethology in Leiden are an amalgamation of pre-Meiji collections with an ethnographic disposition and religious sculptures made available from the contemporary dissolution of Buddhist temples. The

28 Raymond Koechlin collected Korean ceramics alongside Japanese before he began to collect Chinese. Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 102. 29 Paul Gers, Corée, 1900, retrieved 24-5-2018, https://www.worldfairs.info/expopavillondetails.php?expo_id=8&pavillon_id=804. 24

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ethnographic museum was created directly out of the Von Siebold Japanese Museum, and to which similar collections were added, which had been previously displayed in a Cabinet of Rarities. This is the only case study in which ethnographic interests were the overt focus of the collections. As a museum of ethnography in the 1880s, the director was influenced by developments in France relating to the study of Asian religions, to then purchase a significant group of Japanese Buddhist statues. Although this acquisition is ethnographic in how it relates to religion, the description of the beauty of the sculptures and its display in a garden show that the museum was influenced by the general aesthetic interest in Japanese material culture at that time. The collections of the following case study are now also in an ethnographic museum, but unlike those in Leiden, these come from a variety of private collections with mixed motivations.

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Chapter 2: Milan – Trade and Industry

The collections which today make up the Asian section of the Museo delle Culture (MUDEC) in Milan come from a variety of sources. Like the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, it is based upon multiple collections from multiple collectors. However in contrast to the delayed but steady progress of amalgamating non-European collections in the Netherlands, the creation of MUDEC comes from the gradual removal of ethnographic material from other museums. MUDEC was opened in 2015 but the collections belong to the Raccolte Extra-europee (Non-European Collections) of Sforza Castle that were gathered together in 1900. It is these collections, formed and developed during the Meiji period, that will be examined. Today, the museum’s Japanese collection contains 1,574 objects and the Chinese collection 1,028. These overshadow the South-East Asian collection at 285 objects, but the single largest collection in the museum is the Pre-Colombian and Amerindian collection at 1,627 artefacts. The numbers of these last two collections contrast with those of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden due to their respective nations’ interest in these geographic regions. The Netherlands concentrated much of their scholarship on the cultures of the East Indies where colonial expansion was strongest, rather than in the West Indies and the Caribbean. Italy, or rather, Italians, had a stronger relationship with the emerging independent states in South America, which led to the scholarship and collecting of the indigenous cultures there. The Non-European Collections are a civic collection that were first displayed together at Sforza Castle in 1901. The origins of these collections span the nineteenth century and derived from collections of artists, entrepreneurs, nobles and missionaries. The oldest ethnographic collections came from museums of archaeology and natural history, some Asian artefacts entered the collections from an art museum that inherited the artefacts from an industrial exposition, and the most important collections of East Asian objects originate from the travel collections of wealthy businessmen. These three categories formed the Non- European Collections. Italy was unified fifty years after the foundation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the museums in Milan created in the aftermath were not national museums, nor was there an interest in the emerging field of ethnology. The Museum of Archaeology (Museo Patrio Archeologico) was founded in 1862 and the Natural History Museum (Museo di Storia Naturale) was moved to Palazzo Dugnani the year after. These museums bolstered the standing of the city of Milan in its changed position as a regional city in the Kingdom of Italy,

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instead of the capital of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. A focus on archaeology and natural history further established the longevity of the city. Both of these museums had ethnographic sections, and these were the first category to contribute to the Non-European Collections of Milan. The ethnographic collection of artist Giuseppe Bossi was moved from the Pinacoteca di Brera to the Museum of Archaeology in 1864, and the Natural History Museum received the ethnographic collections of the Saint Calogero Seminar of Foreign Missions. The idea of including contemporary man-made objects from different cultures in museums to compare with non-extant ancient cultures and specimens from nature was common to many museums in Europe as a comparative practice, as was the case in Natura Artis Magistra in Amsterdam. This practice held on through to the twentieth century, and the last of the ethnographic collections of the Natural History Museum were moved to the Sforza Castle in 1929. When the Natural History Museum had been founded in 1838, it inherited the collections of Italian naturalists and universal collectors, with animal specimens, fossils, minerals and ethnographic artefacts combined. This interest in ethnography was quite early, comparable to the work and collections of Von Siebold. However in the second half of the century after the unification of the country, ethnography was studied and displayed mainly in the new national museums in Florence and Rome. The ethnographic collections of the Natural History Museum were classed as artefacts of everyday life, not as works of art. In 1876 a large number of prehistoric and ethnographic objects were sent to Rome to become part of the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. By 1906 the ethnographic collection of the Natural History Museum contained 701 objects, including objects from India and China from the original missionary collection and later dispatches from Asia, as well as individual donations of objects from Japan.30 In 1882 the director of the museum placed the ethnographic collections in storage until it was eventually transferred to Sforza Castle. The previous director Emilio Cornalia had proposed the establishment of a separate ethnographic museum, and later Pompeo Castelfranco, the inspector of excavations and monuments in Milan, advocated for such a museum. Nothing became of these plans, however, and the ethnographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology were placed in storage along with those of the Natural History Museum in 1887 and later brought to Sforza Castle. The Museum of Archaeology, a state-owned entity, and the ethnographic section remained state property while in the depots of the Natural History Museum, until it was officially given to the city in 1903.

30 Pietro Amadini, Arti dell’Asia Orientale tra pubblico e privato: due raccolte esemplari. Dal 1870, cent’anni di collezionismo d’arte cinese e giapponese a Milano, (Università Ca’ Foscari, Doctoral Thesis, 2013), 133. 27

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

The second category of collections to form the Non-European Collections, particularly of Asian objects, came from the museums which developed out of the 1874 Historic Exposition of Industrial Art (Esposizione Storica d’Arte Industriale) in Milan. At the 1873 International Exhibition in Vienna, Milan had won the most awards out of all the Italian cities present. The Italian Industrial Association decided that the following year an international exhibition of “art at the service of industry” would be held in Milan. From this exhibition it was planned to establish a museum of industrial art, in the same way that the Orientalisches Museum was created to house exhibits from the International Exhibition in Vienna. On 4 July 1874 the Historic Exposition of Industrial Art was opened with the royal family in attendance. Approximately 200 works from Japan and China were on display at the exhibition. Unfortunately, the proposal for the creation of a museum of industrial art did not get the traction with the city that had been expected. Despite the presence of Japanese cultural objects at the Exposition, the cultural sphere in Milan was not entirely enthralled with Japanese culture. According to the publication on the World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, the Japanese still had not perfected their products, and were only selling some unrefined textiles.31 International Expositions were an effective means to promote national industry on an international scale, advertising industrial products, technology, arts and crafts. Conversely it was an opportunity to gain inspiration and knowledge from a broader range of cultures. The potential of these expositions was seen to best effect in the interaction between European and East Asian countries, particularly Japan. Indeed, the Meiji government commissioned workshops to create ‘typical’ Japanese products, designed to appeal to the audiences of the expositions. As we have seen from the 1883 exhibition in Amsterdam, dealers were also present and allowed for the trading of Asian objects, influenced by the flourishing interest in Asia. China was the first East Asian country to take part in International Exhibitions, but due to domestic political instability, it did not concentrate as much effort on these events as did Japan. With International Exhibitions increasing in importance and extravagance from the 1870s until the twentieth century, Meiji Japan focused state resources on these events as a way to improve its diplomatic standing as well as develop its export industry. The Municipal Museum of Art (Museo Artistico Municipale) was the successor of the Museum of Industrial Art (Museo d’Arte Industriale), which had been formed and managed

31 “Il popolo giapponese deve ancora perfezionare le sue manifatture, e quando vi si proverà, non si curerà più di fabbricare certe coperte e tappeti che sono appesi vicino agli altri tessuti; questi prodotti grossolani sono tutti venduti, fatto questo che non torna gran che a lode degli acquisitori.” See note 5 in Kinkô: i bronzi estremo-orientali dalla Raccolta etnografica del Castello Sforzesco, (Milano: Mazzotta, 1995), 19. 28

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by the Italian Industrial Association for the 1874 exposition. The Municipal Museum of Art was created in 1878 and inherited many of the exhibits from the exposition, including part of the Asian collection of Count Giovanni Battista Lucini Passalacqua which will be examined later. Other noble families of the region donated to the city, many having eighteenth-century Chinese and Japanese objects as household decorations. The catalogue of the new museum did not detail the Asian objects on exhibit at the earlier Exposition, perhaps because at that time these objects still officially belonged to the Museum of Industrial Art, but also the civic collections of Asian objects were not on display at the opening of the Municipal Museum of Art according to the lack of information in the catalogue.32 Many of the Asian collections which arrived in Milan during this time were related to the silk trade. The economy of Northern Italy had relied heavily on silk manufacturing since the mid-eighteenth century, but a century later, a silkworm blight endangered the industry. From 1855 until 1870, when Louis Pasteur introduced quarantine measures to prevent the spread of the disease among the silkworms, French and Italian merchants travelled to China and Japan each year to bring back healthy silkworms. This was an annual event throughout this period, as the silkworms, once brought to Europe, would eventually succumb to the disease, preventing reproduction and the continuation of the silkworm crop. Japan’s sericulture increased dramatically during this time, benefitting especially from China’s damaged industry as a result of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). In addition to its domestic industry, Japan began producing silkworm seed to sell to the international traders gathering in their newly-opened port cities, particularly Yokohama. The art and antiques trade flourished there with many of the visitors opting to purchase objects as souvenirs or as profitable curiosities for their home market, especially with the favourable exchange rate. The most important Japanese collections in Milan were connected in some way to this silk route. Travel to Japan for the silkworm trade peaked in the early 1870s but declined quickly after the adoption of Pasteur’s methods. Works collected in Yokohama by the Italian merchants in the 1870s mostly date from the end of the Edo period, with only a small number of contemporary works.33 This shows that at this stage Meiji Japan’s artistic export production had not yet grown to flood the market, as it would a decade later, with goods catering to Western taste and expectations of Japanese art.

32 Carolina Orsini and Anna Antonini, Objects of encounter MUDEC - Museo delle Culture : catalogue of works and exhibit guide, (2016), 30, note 15. 33 Orsini and Antonini, Objects of encounter, 105. 29

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The last category to add to the formation of the Non-European Collections are of the travel collections of local nobles and businessmen from the silkworm seed trade. The three most important East Asian collections of this time are the Passalacqua, Giussani and Meazza collections. Count Giovanni Battista Lucini Passalacqua (1845-1890) went on a tour of the world in 1871, accompanying Ferdinando Meazza, an experienced traveller and trader whose own collection will be examined later. Passalacqua travelled first to Japan on the Pei-Ho, a steamboat that allowed direct travel between Marseille and Yokohama, without having to change ships at Hong Kong. This was one of the advancements in transport of the era, adapting to the specific demand of French and Italian silkworm seed traders. Other advancements at that time, such as the opening of the Suez Canal and the First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, contributed to the ease and popularity of global travel. Passalacqua spent four months in Yokohama where he purchased hundreds of objects on the advice of Meazza and Pietro Savio, who had both been to Japan previously. His relations with the Italian trading community gave him this early opportunity to visit Japan and form one of the first travel collections in Italy. Passalacqua displayed his collection privately for guests at his villa in Moltrasio near Lake Como from 1885. It has been referred to as the ‘Museo Giapponese’ or Japanese Museum Passalacqua, however the first written use of this name is in the Verbale di Consegna of 1900.34 The presence of many Chinese objects within the collection would indicate that Passalacqua had not such a narrow focus in his collection from Asia, and he spent one month of his travels in China. With regard to his collection of bronze works, the ratio of Japanese to Chinese works is approximately equal, and match the composition of other collectors of that time, such as Henri Cernuschi. Cernuschi set off on his round the world trip in the same year as Passalacqua, but arrived in Japan later, as he began the first leg of his trip in America.35 While most of the collection is from the late Edo period, Passalacqua purchased some contemporary bronze vases in Japan that were displayed at the 1874 exposition. Japanese bronzework was highly admired in Europe for its craftsmanship, particularly with the lost- wax casting method and the lacquering of metal.36 Passalacqua purchased bronze vases of the

34 Pietro Amadini, “La Sala dei Bronzi al Castello Sforzesco. Le collezioni aziatiche” in Silvia Paoli, Luca Beltrami: 1854-1933 ; storia, arte e architettura a Milano, (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana Ed, 2014), 209 n. 9. 35 Laura Basso, “18 gennaio 1900: un documento e qualche nota per il Museo Artistico Municipale,” (Milan: Libri Et Documenti / Archivio Storico Civico E Biblioteca Trivulziana / Archivio Storico Civico, 2012), 208. 36 “Di là portò quella ricca collezione di oggetti d’arte, specialmente di bronzi tanto ammirata da quanti la videro.” Periodico Società Storica Comense (1890), 23-24, as quoted in Amadini, “La Sala dei Bronzi," 209, n.8. 30

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm school of Murata Seimin which was active from the late-eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth century. This school was highly regarded in Japan for developing the craft bronze work, producing both everyday and ceremonial objects. Works from this school had appeared at the Vienna and Paris International Exhibitions. Passalacqua was not only a collector of Asian objects, the catalogue of the Exposition shows that he contributed arts and crafts of various European provenance.37 The Japanese collection as a whole shows much variation in the types of objects collected and is consistent with the type of wide-ranging interests common at the time, rather than a highly specific interest in a particular category of object. The count’s collection was based on his travels, which gave the pieces in his collection a connection to his personal experiences. In comparison to Passalacqua’s travel collection, typical of other such dilettanti at the time, the collection of Carlo Giussani (1846-1930) was comparable in quality to that of cognoscenti like Edoardo Chiossone. Giussani arrived in Japan in 1870 at the peak of the trade in silkworms, but stayed on after the end of that market. He married a Japanese woman, worked as an agent for foreign companies and spoke and wrote Japanese. He lived in Japan for over thirty years and on his return to Italy he brought back approximately 1,000 objects of diverse character which aimed to give a comprehensive representation of Japanese artistic production. The woodcuts and maps he collected were given to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and the rest of his collection would go to Sforza Castle. He had a collection of approximately 120 Edo-period netsuke, 24 scroll paintings, various textiles, lacquerware, ceramics and weapons. Giussani profited from the anti-Buddhist movement with the purchase of an Amida Buddha statue during his stay in Yokohama (see Fig. 6). According to Amadini, this Buddha resembles one purchased by Émile Guimet in 1877 which is dated from 1699 and recent technical research on the Giussani Buddha places it in that era.38 As seen from the quality of Buddhist bronzes available from dealers such as Siegfried Bing and Dirk Boer, it was not uncommon to be able to purchase important Buddhist works in Japan during the 1870s.

37 Esposizione storica d’arte industrial in Milano 1874: catalogo generale / publicato dal Comitato esecutivo, (1874), 97. 38 Amadini in Orsini and Antonini, Objects of encounter, 103. 31

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Figure 6. Amida Buddha purchased by Giussani in Yokohama. The previously mentioned Ferdinando Meazza (1837/8-1913) who went with Passalacqua to Japan, was an artist, collector, art dealer and silk trader. He made eleven journeys in total to Japan to buy silkworm seed, the first being in 1867. Following the Italo- Japanese treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1866, he accompanied the first Italian ambassador Count Vittorio Salier de la Tour, to pre-Meiji Japan. Access to silkworm seed was an important aspect of diplomatic relations from the beginning, and that first trip to Japan included visits to silkworm farms outside Yokohama. Meazza was involved in the international art trade, and in 1875 sold a collection of Japanese ceramics to Henri Cernuschi, as reported by Philippe Burty in an article from 1899.39 It is possible that the two had met

39 Amadini, Arti dell’Asia Orientale, 169. 32

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previously in Yokohama in 1871, though they may have been connected simply through the art market. Meazza’s associations with the Parisian collecting scene gave his collection of ceramics, weapons and paintings a consistent character, however the lack of Japanese paintings and drawings show that as an artist, he was not inspired in the same way as the avant-garde. His collection showed a shrewd understanding of the art market. When Meazza was compelled to sell parts of his collection in the 1880s and 1890s at auction during times of financial difficulties, and later to the city, he was able to recoup his investment.40 At the end of the nineteenth century in Milan when the Non-European Collections were being formed from the ethnographic and non-European collections of the various museums discussed, interest in Asian cultures was particularly prominent. In 1898 the Chiossone collection arrived in Genoa, and despite not being exhibited, it generated a lot of interest. Carlo Ermes Visconti, director of the art collections at Sforza Castle, was influential in the decision to create a section for Asian art in the Non-European Collections. This led to the acquisition of the collections of Passalacqua, Giussani and Meazza, as well as those of other travel collectors. In 1899, Visconti purchased the majority of the Passalacqua collection from Alessandra Negrotto who had inherited it from her uncle. Visconti enlisted the aid of Lodovico Pogliaghi (a Milanese painter, sculptor and collector) in the acquisition of the collection, which was not put up for auction along with the contents of the count's villa in 1897, and the favourable price of 10,000 lire would indicate that Visconti was able to come to a private agreement with Negrotto.41 The 360 inventoried items were reunited with the few Asian works the count had given to the Museum of Industrial Art after the Exposition and were then in the care of the Municipal Museum of Art. An 1893 donation by the widow of Cristoforo Robecchi, first consul to Japan, consisted of six painted scrolls and 140 objects (coins, clothing accessories, dolls) which had never previously been exhibited. The joint Museums of Archaeology and Art were inaugurated in 1900, though the previous museums remained officially distinct until 1903, with separate committees. In the same year, the Milanese industrialist Felice Bisleri donated his collection of objects from the various countries where his company had branches, including Asia. Luigi Bricchetti Robecchi, an engineer from Pavia and a scholar of Asian cultures, donated his collection from his travels to the Castle in 1905. In 1908 Giussani donated approximately 300 objects from his collection as a contribution to the increase in knowledge of industrial production of art. This donation

40 Amadini, Arti dell’Asia Orientale, 173. 41 Amadini, “La Sala dei Bronzi," 209 n. 6. 33

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm included 24 scroll paintings, 21 pieces of embroidery, weapons, helmets, hats, costumes, sabres and lances.42 The rest of the collection, which consisted of objects of everyday life and traditional culture, was given to his nephew Filippo Giorgio Benvenuto Villa (1880-1936) and eventually came to the Castle in the 1930s when it had established a Museum of Oriental Art. In 1920 the ethnographic collection of the Milanese doctor Achille Turati came to the castle. He had travelled widely around the world between 1903 and 1914, and his collection from Japan included an interesting selection of shoes, but is most notable for its extensive photographic archive. As can be seen from all of these collections, there was a time lag of at least a decade between their acquisition in Japan and their arrival in the museum. These later acquisitions are further evidence to the many different guises in which the Asian collections were displayed – from (industrial) crafts to art and ethnographic objects. The last acquisition of a Milanese Asian collection from the time of the silk trading voyages took place in 1910, when the few dozen works left in Meazza’s collection after his various auctions were bought by the city of Milan. The Non-European Collections had a long process of acquisitions and donations throughout its early decades of existence, and this shaped how various directors and curators wished to display its contents. At the opening of the museum in Sforza Castle in 1900, the Asian collections were dispersed throughout the museum. The lacquerware and weaponry were located in the Sala della Torre. It is likely that the Chinese and Japanese ceramics were displayed there with Italian and other foreign examples.43 Textiles were an important category of collection, with the quality of silk and embroidery attractive as objects of decoration and fashion, and the technical skill valued as an incentive for the improvement of industrial production. Asian textiles and clothes were kept in the Sala dei Costumi. Bronzes were displayed together in the Sala dei Bronzi, the former ducal apartments (see Fig. 7). In the central display case of the Sala dei Bronzi, an incense burner in the shape of a crane stood above other temple and domestic incense burners, and vases of different sizes for flower arrangement. At the base of the case was a water container for the tea ceremony, two Chinese tripedal incense burners and a small incense burner in the form of a peacock. Across from the case at the long wall of the room, stood a chest of drawers upon which three bronze statues depicting Laozi, Buddha and Confucius sat. These three statues of the fathers of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism had been previously exhibited at the 1874 exhibition as the Indian Trinity (‘trinità indiana’). There were also examples of works made for the

42 Kinkô, 17. 43 Amadini, “La Sala dei Bronzi,” 207. 34

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Western market. Elongated vases with motifs associated with the Orient, such as waves, dragons, and flowers such as peonies, chrysanthemums and lotuses, are typical of the export ware made with universal exhibitions in mind.

Figure 7. Sala dei Bronzi at Castello Sforzesco 1901-1902. In 1910 there was a plan to create a collection of ethnography and oriental bronzes (Raccolta etnografica e dei bronzi orientali), which was meant to encompass Egyptian antiquities and pre-Colombian American objects as well as the Asian bronzes and metal objects displayed with Italian and French Renaissance works in bronze.44 The addition of the Giussani collection in 1908 was the impetus of the re-evaluation of the Asian collection and the wish to gather them together to display. This project was approved by the city and funds were allocated, but it did not come to pass due to administrative difficulties.

44 “Si intendeva allora di comprendere sotto il nome di raccolta etnografica quell complesso d’antichità egiziane e dell’America Pre-colombiana da tempo sottratte alla vista del pubblico. I bronzi, i ferri che con quelle si sarebbero raccolti nella stessa sala, ma distribuiti nel modo più acconcio, sono quelli che ora si conservano nella Sala II del primo piano, allato ai bronzi italiani e francesi del Quattrocento, del Cinquecento, del Seicento.” M. Scherillo, Esame di alcuni bisogni del Castello Sforzesco e dei Musei che vi hanno sede. Relazione dell’assessore, Presidente delegato, (Milano, 1910), 11-12 in Kinkô, 20, note 31. 35

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The combined Japanese collections of the Non-European Collections today consist of objects from the Momoyama (1573-1615) to the Meiji (1868-1912) era, mainly porcelain, export bronzes, religious sculptures, weapons and textiles. These can be divided into objects that represent Japanese traditional culture and express Japanese artistic values, and objects that were made for export. The Chinese collections consists for the most part of ceramics, particularly porcelain plates and vases made for the domestic market and for export to the Middle East and Europe over two thousand years. Other ceramics include grave goods, architectural elements and stoneware. The second most significant category are bronzes, mostly reproductions of archaic vessels and religious statues. Ivories, lacquerware and paintings are also present. In the catalogue for Kinkô: I bronzi estremo-orientali dalla Raccolta etnografica del Castello Sforzesco, when describing the safekeeping of the most valued collections during the second world war, Claudio Salsi states that the oriental art that was preserved, was believed at that time to be mostly Chinese. With the prior emphasis of the curation of the collection being on Japan, does this show that forty years after the Asian collections came to the castle, the international trend of appreciating and re-evaluating Chinese artefacts affected the perception of the composition of the collection? Pietro Amadini notes in his thesis charting one hundred years of East Asian art collecting in Milan, that there is a division in focus and in literature between Japan in the nineteenth century and China in the twentieth century. This division is artificial for the reason that during the nineteenth century, the collections of Japanese and Chinese objects were often mixed.45 Chinese culture was highly admired in Japan until the end of the nineteenth century, and even during and after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Classical Chinese culture remained venerated, though distinct from the perceived decadence of contemporary China. In the 1870s, visitors to Japan could procure Japanese artworks cheaply because wages were too low to allow for a strong domestic art market. Chinese art objects in Japan were often antiques or copies of antiques, which were highly prized and remained expensive in Japan.46 There was a lack of understanding of classical Chinese culture among Europeans, such as the art of collecting scholars’ rocks. By comparison, Japanese export ware was much more accessible to a European audience, which contributed to the appreciation of Japanese artistic objects over Chinese.

45 Amadini, Arti dell’Asia Orientale, 4-5. 46 Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 55. 36

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China had previously been foremost in terms of European perceptions of Asia, and its porcelain and silks were in demand for home decoration and fashion for centuries. During the course of the nineteenth century, China suffered many military defeats in which it lost territory and was forced to grant privileges to other nations. Qing China did attempt to reform its government, modernize its military and industrialize, but it was not successful in preventing the demise of the dynasty. Its cultural cachet was also degraded internationally by the decadence of chinoiserie and its defeat in the Opium Wars. However in the late 1890s, the construction of railways in the north and west of the country brought about the discovery of archaeological sites, such as Xi’an. Foreign companies were contracted to work on these projects and favourable trading conditions led to the appearance of ancient Chinese ceramics and bronzes on the Western market at the beginning of the twentieth century. This renewed the appreciation for the antiquity of Chinese culture. According to M.M. Lamberti in 1987, Italy lacked the Japonist artistic scene to inculcate the Asian collections being formed at the end of the nineteenth century, as was the case in France.47 However although there were not the same artistic publications of catalogues and magazines as in Paris, Japan-related articles were often published in Italian magazines. In the 1870s, Illustrazione Italiana published travel diaries and correspondences which were more trained on the customs and traditions of Japanese people rather than on the artistic production there. When the European Congress on Oriental Studies was held in Florence in 1878, it focused exclusively on ethnographic issues. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Italian art critics felt that the Italian artistic scene was lagging behind in artistic appreciation of Asian artworks. The collections formed during the 1870s remained private and were not publicly displayed, resulting in the impression that Italian collections were falling behind those well- known French collections. In 1904 Vittorio Pica lamented that there were still few Italian connoisseurs of Japanese art, in comparison to France, England and the United States. Pica had already published the book Arte dell’Estremo Oriente in 1894. At the 1902 Esposizione internazionale d’arte decorativa moderna in Turin, he denounced the choice of commercial objects over purely artistic ones.48 In 1905 the Chiossone museum opened in Genoa, displaying prints, paintings, weapons, armour, bronzes, ritual vases, porcelain, enamels, lacquerware, and textiles. This connoisseur’s collection provided the standard of the new aesthetic appreciation for Japanese objects. Later in the 1920s, collectors such as Riccardo

47 Kinkô, 9. 48 Kinkô, 12. 37

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm

Gualino, began to focus on specific types of objects, influenced by developments in archaeology in East Asia, which led to a newfound appreciation of the antiquity of those cultures. In contrast to the individual collections in Genoa, Florence and Venice, the majority of the collections in Milan come from the commercial and industrial background of business in Asia. The objects in this context were not always chosen for artistic or decorative reasons, but as souvenirs and symbols of the way of life encountered there. The city of Milan gathered together these disparate collections, not with specific museums in mind, but to document the collection history of the city. The current situation of the Milanese Japanese collections in a museum of ethnology belies the various forms of representation throughout the collections’ history. Unlike in the Netherlands where at the end of the nineteenth century museums’ disciplines were being carefully (if not always consistently) defined, in Milan bureaucratic difficulties foiled many plans to create specific institutions to house certain collections. The variety of collections housed at the Castle allowed a fluidity in the exhibitions rooms to display objects of various provenances together by theme, and to shift the focus from an ethnographic to an artistic perspective within the same museum. The collections in the Museo delle Culture in Milan were not collected with specifically ethnographic goals. The Non-European Collections of Sforza Castle were a combination of ethnographic objects from the depots of museums which did not have a place for them, the remnants of an industrial arts exhibition held by an art museum, and the donations or acquisitions of travel collections of wealthy businessmen. The Japanese collections in Sforza Castle were mostly of the latter type, showing that the motivations of the collectors were mostly of curiosity. The fact that the collections have recently become displayed in an ethnological museum is unrelated to how they were originally collected. The many individual collectors who contributed to the museum, show a pattern of wealthy industrialists or noblemen travelling the world to collect souvenirs, which will contrast and complement with the single collections which make up the case studies of the following two chapters.

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Chapter 3: The Hague – Japonism

The Hague was an important hub of interest in Japan in late-nineteenth-century Netherlands. It had been the birthplace of the Dutch Japanese ethnographic collections in the Royal Cabinet of Rarities at the beginning of the century, and Japonism as an aesthetic interest spread there from Paris at the end of the century. Throughout the century, there was an institution, readily accessible to the public in the form of Dirk Boer’s Grand Royal Bazar which opened in 1843. As seen in the discussion of the late-nineteenth century collections of the National Museum of Ethnology, this was an important supplier of Japanese objects. At the beginning of the century, Boer was an equally important source for the collections of the future King William II. Boer had been working in the curio and antique trade since 1820, and by the 1830s, with the support of the Prince of Orange, he concentrated on Asian objects, particularly Japan and China.49 In his Kabinet van Japansche, Chineesche en Oostersche zeldzaamheden, antiquiteiten en rariteiten of 1841, the objects in his collection he describes are lacquerware, weapons and everyday items. The descriptions are contextualized in chapters describing the art and daily life of the culture of provenance, and such concentration on context rather than the object itself, shows an ethnographic rather than aesthetic eye. Boer never visited East Asia, he accumulated his Japanese collection through connections with Dutch traders in Dejima, but he did travel annually to the Middle East. His ‘bazar’ of 1843 was probably inspired by his visits there, though his filled his shop with Japanese and Chinese objects. Peter van Dam wrote an informative article about Dirk Boer and his Bazar, and asserted that they ‘must be seen as an expression of Japonism, the craze for things Japanese, at a very early stage.’50 However, while it is true that Japan was well-represented in Boer’s Bazar (reasonable considering the Dutch connection with Dejima), China was no less a part of the picture. A visitor to the Bazar in 1878 reported that ‘here China and Japan rival each other in wealth, diversity, and invention […] from the finest porcelain cups and saucers […] to the heaviest and most expensive vases and goblets; from the most extraordinary bronze specimens to the most common mats and fans.’ The visitor continued – ‘For some time, Japan has been arousing the admiration of anyone who has a feeling for art,’ showing that China and Japan were seen as being equal in status, that the objects represented ranged from

49 Advertisements for his bazar also specified Turkish products. See Keblusek, Japansch magazijn, 8. 50 Peter van Dam, “The royal bazar of Dirk Boer. Early Japonism in the Hague around 1840,” Andon 7, no. 25 (1987): 19. 39

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm art to artefact, and the fact that artistic interest in Japan was seen as a recent phenomenon.51 The everyday objects were displayed through installations of scenes of dolls dressed in costume partaking in daily activities, showing an ethnographic interest in foreign ways of life.

Figure 8. Japansche Zaal/ Salon Japonais at the Grand Royal Bazar. Hendrik Wilhelmus Lust, De Japanse zaal in de Grand Bazar, ca.1854. At the same time, Parisian Japonism was influencing artistic society in The Hague. The artists’ society Pulchri Studio was not a latecomer to the trend, as already in 1886 the society had its first Japanese-themed evening, six years before Siegfried Bing initiated his dîners Japonais (see Fig. 9 for a photograph of a similar party in 1900). In 1891, the society staged De Japansche Tentoonstelling with the collection of the late Bauduin brothers who had held positions of importance in late-Edo period and early-Meiji Japan. A.J. Bauduin came to Japan as a trader on Dejima in 1859 and later became a consul of the Netherlands in Kobe. A.F. Bauduin, a doctor, was invited to Japan in 1862 by the shogunate to teach medicine at universities in Nagasaki, Osaka and Tokyo. The brothers had great interest in photography and have left an important photographic collection in Japan.52 As part of their prestigious positions during their time in Japan, they also received gifts, and the collection of A.F. Bauduin had been exhibited previously at the 1883 International and Colonial Exhibition

51 Renske Suijver and Bram Donders, Mesdag & Japan, (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2018), 52. 52 “Bauduin Collection: photographic albums of Japan around the end of the shogunate period,” Nagasaki University Library, accessed 16-8-2018, http://oldphoto.lb.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/bauduins/en/11.html. 40

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in Amsterdam. The society chairman at the time of Pulchri Studio’s exhibition was Hendrik Willem Mesdag.

Figure 9. Japan-inspired party at Pulchri Studio, The Hague, 1900. H.W. Mesdag (1831-1915) was an influential artist and collector, well-known in the Netherlands and abroad. He was born into a wealthy banking family in Groningen, but left the business when he was thirty-five years old in order to pursue a career as a painter. He moved with his wife and son to Brussels to study painting on the advice of his cousin Lourens Alma Tadema who was already a successful artist at this time. In Brussels Mesdag was able to build a network in the artistic world which allowed him to collect art as well as create it. The two activities were intertwined; in the beginning of his career he worked in a naturalistic and accurate style and collected works in a similar manner. As his style evolved, so too did his collecting interests. He sought out works which showed the artists’ processes, and he became known to dealers for his preference for unfinished, sketchy works. As an artist he was known for his seascapes, and his magnum opus is the Panorama Mesdag, a 14.5 x 114.5m painting of the sea and beach at Scheveningen, which he painted in the early 1880s with assistance from his wife Sientje and other artists. As a collector, he was known for his works of the Barbizon school, and of the Hague school, of which he was himself a member. The Mesdags moved to The Hague in 1869, and Hendrik was able to secure his reputation as an artist by winning gold medals in the Paris Salon exhibition of 1870

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and in the Dutch Exhibition of Living Artists in 1872. He was a patron of the arts, financially supporting the Italian artist Antonio Mancini in exchange for paintings, despite never having met in person. In The Hague, Mesdag was able to use his social skills and entrepreneurial expertise to become involved in artistic societies. He founded the Dutch Watercolour Society (Hollandsche Teekenmaatschappij) in 1876, and by 1889 he was chairman of the Pulchri Studio. Sientje became chair of Onze Club, a society of female artists. Through these endeavours in the cultural domain of The Hague, the Mesdags were able to expand their network of connections in the art market. Mesdag’s father’s death in 1881 left him with a vast inheritance which allowed him to purchase art on a larger scale. He established a museum, built adjacent to his house in 1887, which was open by appointment to artists and art-lovers on Sunday mornings. Mesdag would welcome the visitors and lead them through the museum, beginning the tour in his studio and visiting also that of his wife. His aim was ostensibly to improve The Hague residents’ appreciation of art, but the limited opening times, restriction by appointment and personal attention given by Mesdag show that this act was mainly a consolidation of his cultural status and image. He did promote his collection for the general public through albums of reproductions, although this too served chiefly to publicize his collection while retaining its exclusivity. The museum was established in order to showcase Mesdag’s painting collection, but it was designed with great care given to the furnishings and decorations. “Mrs Mesdag’s studio, which is on the ground floor and directly below her husband’s, and in which there are tall bookcases hidden behind a heavy curtain, containing among other things biographies of the French painters of the Romantic School, leads through a corridor, off which a second studio with her studies and unfinished works opens, into the large central hall. This room, in which the wide panels of the walls are hung with tapestries and the floor is covered with a Smyrna carpet, primarily contains antique Japanese bronzes and porcelain tankards and vases insofar as they are not distributed throughout the entire house, which is itself a museum of art.”53 Indeed the house became an extension of the museum, with no clear distinction between the works kept in the house and those in the museum (see Fig. 10). Even with the donation of the museum to the State in 1903, the distribution of the artworks remained according to Mesdag’s taste. His position as director allowed him to manage the museum collection, and it was assumed that upon his death his private collection would go to the museum.

53 Maite Van Dijk and Renske Suijver, The Mesdag Collection, (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum Publ., 2011), 19. 42

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Figure 10. Room in the Mesdag house, 1915. It is unclear what role Sientje took in the collecting of Japanese and other Asian decorative arts as we lack the documentation available through Mesdag’s correspondence and records. She played an equal part in the development of the painting collection; her husband would not make a purchase without her approval.54 This is made poignantly clear from the fact that Mesdag never made another art purchase after Sientje’s death in 1909. Mesdag’s main advisor with regard to his Japanese collection was Philip Zilcken who sat on the Pulchri Studio board with Mesdag, and was himself a collector of Japanese pottery and bronzes. In 1881 he had begun to correspond with Edmond de Goncourt and due to this became interested in the “Orient,” which included North Africa. He was an Orientalist painter of the group of Marius Bauer, inspired by his travels to Algiers in 1883. He regularly wrote about the Mesdag Japanese collection in the press, and from 1895, he compiled the catalogues of

54 “I presented your proposal of paying 2000 guilders for the 4 drawings by J. Bosboom and 2 by J. Weissenbruch to my wife. She recommended I accept it, and so I will.” Letter from Mesdag to the Maison Artz gallery, The Hague, 1896. Accessed June 29, 2018, https://www.demesdagcollectie.nl/en/about-mesdag-and- his-collection/a-museum-of-their-own#4. 43

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the museum. For the Japanese objects in the collection, he consulted a Mr. Nojima of the Japanese Mission (the precursor to the embassy).55 Mesdag’s inspirations as a painter were the main focus of the museum. He would display paintings from the Barbizon and The Hague schools, not geographically or chronologically, but in a way that he believed best highlighted and linked their aesthetic qualities. Intermingled with these were his own paintings, as well as his wife’s, showing their significance as contemporary Dutch painters and inheritors of an important French artistic tradition. Notable absences in the lineage presented by Mesdag are Impressionism and Symbolism, both important artistic movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their exclusion is to be expected in such an artist's collection. The vivid colours of Impressionism and the narrative subjects of Symbolism had no influence on Mesdag's art and did not interest him as a collector. There are also some exceptions to his rules of the Barbizon and The Hague schools. He collected some Orientalist works by John Singer Sargent and Marius Bauer, though this is likely due to his interest in the painting techniques or aesthetic qualities rather than subject matter.56 In addition to Mesdag’s extensive international connections of artists and dealers, he also shopped locally. He purchased paintings and decorative art objects at the gallery of Van Wisselingh & Co. in The Hague. The gallery was managed by E.J. van Wisselingh, who returned from Paris to the Netherlands in 1884 to take over the family business after the death of his father. He was well-acquainted with Japonism from his work in Paris, and in 1886 he displayed Japanese, Chinese, and Persian objects alongside modern paintings.57 This eclectic style of display was fashionable at the time. During the first years of the museum, Mesdag bought sixty Japanese objects at this gallery, as well as other decorative objects of Asian provenance. Van Wisselingh was well connected to other dealers, and the pair of large bronze cranes he sold to Mesdag in 1889 may have been those exhibited at the 1883 International Colonial and Export Trade Exhibition in Amsterdam.58 The prices of some Japanese pieces were comparable to paintings, with Mesdag paying 500 guilders for the aforementioned bronze cranes, and 650 guilders for a large satsuma vase with a cover.59 Mesdag was a master

55 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 48. 56 See the thick brushstrokes on Sargent’s Egyptian Indigo Dyers (1891), https://www.demesdagcollectie.nl/en/collection/hwm0302, and Bauer’s technique of closely-spaced lines on Strasbourg Cathedral (1891), https://www.demesdagcollectie.nl/en/collection/hwm0016. 57 Menno Fitski, "Japanese art in the Westendorp-Osieck collection," Arts of Asia, (August, 2008): 49. 58 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 58. 59Van Dijk and Suijver, The Mesdag Collection, 104. 44

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of getting good deals, so the prices paid for these objects were likely very reasonable for the time. In Hendrik Willem Mesdag: kunstenaar, verzamelaar, entrepreneur, the authors make the argument that the greater cost of some of the Japanese objects show that they exceeded their value as decorative items and were on a par with works of ‘fine art.’60 The comparison is made between the cost of 1500 guilders paid by Mesdag for a painting by Jules Dupré, and the 1600 guilders paid for a pair of large Satsuma vases in 1888 to Van Wisselingh.61 However, furnishings not considered ‘fine art,’ such as tapestries, could also be very expensive. As with any house of a wealthy man of high standing, Mesdag’s house, and by extension his museum, were decorated with ornamental objects and antiques. It is worth noting that Mesdag collected antique and contemporary objects and furnishings from Europe and the Asian continent. Listed in Philip Zilcken’s 1910 catalogue of the museum under the section on objects of art, bronzes, pottery, furniture and tapestries, are ‘Oriental,’ ‘Turkish,’ ‘Persian,’ and ‘Chinese’ objects. However the number of Japanese objects far exceeds those in these categories. There are a total of 105 entries for Japanese (including 40 listed only as Satsuma ware), compared to 30 Persian objects (mainly tapestries), 20 Chinese (bronzes and ceramics), and 11 and 9 respectively of 'Oriental' and Turkish.62 Mesdag’s interest in decorative art was also local, and he was a patron of Theodoor Colenbrander who designed for the Rozenburg ceramic factory. Colenbrander became a member of Pulchri Studio in 1883, which is likely how he and Mesdag became acquainted. During his tenure as designer for the Plateelbakkerij Rozenburg between 1884 and 1889, Colenbrander created innovative designs influenced by Asian ceramics. Colenbrander had worked for the Dutch pavilion at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, where he would have had the opportunity to see the arts and crafts displayed at the Asian pavilions. He was inspired by Japanese glazing techniques and motifs, which he further stylized into abstract patterns. But his main influences were from Islamic ceramics, particularly from Iznik, and in Colenbrander’s designs the patterns are rendered more complex or with more colours. Mesdag supported Colenbrander by collecting his ceramics, investing financially in the factory and by using his network to connect the designer with commissions after his

60 Maite van Dijk, Mayken Jonkman, and Renske Suijver, Hendrik Willem Mesdag: kunstenaar, verzamelaar, entrepreneur, (Bussum: Uitgeverij Thoth, 2015), 83. 61 Van Dijk, Jonkman, and Suijver, Hendrik Willem Mesdag, 84. 62 Philip Zilcken, Mesdag Museum: catalogue of the pictures, drawings, etchings and objects of art, (The Hague: Mouton, 1910). 45

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departure from the factory. Mesdag’s patronage of Colenbrander is a third focus of his collecting interests, as it was neither conservative fine art, nor traditional decorative art, but modern and inventive design. As unexpected as this seems, this type of particularity in collecting interests was very common at the time, denoting a developed sense of aesthetic appreciation. A visitor to Museum Mesdag described “a wealth of beautiful and rare Japanese and Chinese bronzes, of porcelain vases with the most elaborate decorations, of real Turkish portières, of cabinets with a collection of modern pottery in the most delightful shades from the Rozenburg factory, antique furniture – [that] all highlight the beauty in all sorts of materials and forms.”63 This description of a heterogeneous collection corresponds with accounts of other private collections at the time.64 The inventory of Mesdag’s home furnishings after his death in 1915 shows great ambiguity of origin. Out of a total of 298 articles of art objects and furnishings, 50 were Japanese and/or Chinese – 10 Japanese (including those designated ‘Imari’), 29 Chinese, and 11 Chinese/Japanese.65 Most of the articles are listed as pots, vases, plates, bowls and cups and are likely to have been either ceramic or bronze when compared to the catalogue for the 1916 auction of the private collection. In the section on Chinese and Japanese porcelains, 9 Japanese, 8 Chinese and 14 unspecified objects are listed. The lack of basic provenance of the majority of these porcelains, is surprising considering the extensive knowledge of the material by the catalogue compiler, shown in the designation of some of the Japanese porcelain as Satsuma ware, and in the explanation of particular subjects in the Chinese porcelain.66 The most recent catalogue lauds the ‘diversity’ of the 148 piece Japanese collection; from incense burners and temple burners to Satsuma ware.67 However the collection is completely lacking in prints, paintings, folding screens, textiles, netsuke/tsuba/inrō, and contains only four pieces of lacquerware. This shows a great contrast with the collections that have been examined in the first two case studies. Mesdag did collect some armour and weaponry, but only individual pieces such as helmets and daggers. The ivory-sheathed dagger with detailed carvings of a crane hunt is a narrative art object in the same way as the ceramics

63 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 70. 64 Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 16. 65 Lijst van diverse goederen, welke zich bevinden in het percoel Laan van Meerdervoort 9, toebehoord hebbende aan wijlen den Heer H.W. Mesdag en die in en verkoop zijn inbegrepen, (Van Gogh Museum, 1915). 66 Collection Mesdag: tableaux, aquarelles, dessins, ..., formant l'ameublement de l'hotel habité par H.W. Mesdag et madame Mesdag-van Houten. (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1916) 47. 67 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 11. 46

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with figurative scenes. The helmets, although dating from the eighteenth century, show later additional decorations of dragons in silver inlay, testifying that these works were updated within the Japanese export market in order to confirm to foreign expectations of East-Asian crafts (see Fig. 11). Military artefacts are often associated with ethnographic collections, but the singularity of these particular objects in Mesdag’s collection aligns them with his aesthetic interests. One object which stands out in both the private and museum collection is the Japanese bronze sculpture mentioned in the 1916 auction catalogue. The monogrammed bronze statuette of an old woman walking with a stick would have been very modern by Japanese standards, as metalworkers up until the Meiji period created works for Buddhist temples or for the samurai and daimyo classes in traditional designs. Unlike in the media of print- making and painting, where artistic expression and invention could be expressed, sculpture as an art form in the same sense as the European tradition did not exist. With the opening of schools of Western art from the 1870s, sculpture became a medium of individual expression for Japanese artists. This statuette of an old woman in the action of walking does not fit in the Buddhist canon, nor in the stylistic traditions of smooth-countenanced figures in repose.68 An artist’s monogram on a sculpture is unusual, rather than having an inscription from the commissioner (see the Leiden Buddha statues), and aligns it more closely to a work of art by intent. Over half of the Japanese objects are ceramics, and Satsuma ware - cream-coloured earthenware with colourful and gilded overglaze - constitutes the bulk of the Japanese ceramics. Based upon Mesdag’s preferences in in his pictorial collection, the prevalence of such brightly-coloured and narrative pieces is surprising. By the end of the nineteenth century, European interest in Japan also included its folktales and mythologies. Tales of Old Japan by Algernon Freeman Mitford were published in 1871, and writings by Lafcadio Hearn were published between 1890 and 1904. This knowledge of European familiarity with these subjects filtered back into the production of Satsuma ware which became increasingly figurative to respond to this interest. Of a smaller number in the Japanese ceramic collection are bowls and caddies from the tea ceremony in muted and abstract glazes, and bowls in the richer colours of kutani-yaki. The form and decoration on these pieces are more aesthetically in line with the subdued colours and evident hand of the artist that Mesdag favoured in the paintings he collected and produced.

68 “[V]ieille femme japonaise, s’appuyant sur un long baton en marchant. Statuette en bronze du Japon avec le monogramme de l’artiste.” Collection Mesdag: tableaux, aquarelles, dessins, ..., 37. 47

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The majority of Mesdag’s collection is contemporary Meiji-era, and in the decades after its formation critical opinion turned away from what was perceived as a decline in Japanese artistic production after the end of the country’s isolation. This came from a recognition that many of the objects created at the time were made for the export market. With the shift in domestic patronage following the end of the feudal era, and the new government’s wish to capitalize on the high demand in Europe and America for Japanese crafts, artisans designed their objects to appeal to Western expectations. This self- exoticisation took form in the conspicuous use of dragon, bird and flower motifs on new objects, and in the addition of such motifs to older works (see Fig. 11). The objects considered today to be highlights of the collection are ones which date from the Edo period, such as the samurai sword by Chōunsai Koretoshi, a raku tea bowl, and one of two extant Arita dishes depicting scenes from a porcelain factory.69 The majority of the objects were bought in the years around the opening of the museum, and from the type and material of objects as well as the placement of them in the rooms it is clear that they were bought to function decoratively. Many ceramics were displayed in or on cabinets, though Mesdag was not overly precious about his Japanese vases, using them also as holders for his paintbrushes (see Fig. 12). Mesdag likely was not interested in and knew very little about the background of his Japanese objects, resulting in a collection of objects that is representative of those on the art market at the time, with the exceptional Edo pieces showing a lack of specific coherence to a collecting policy. In the catalogue for the exhibition Mesdag & Japan, the authors attributed Mesdag’s unlikely taste in Japanese objects to more aesthetic considerations which “reflected the ethos in that period, when the artistic rather than the ethnographic value of non-Western decorative art became increasingly important.”70 However, Mesdag’s main mission in art collecting was to assemble works which he saw as the most important artistic developments in the preceding century until his day, in order to create an art historical progression of which his own art was the heir. Aside from underlying motives of self-aggrandizement, his motives of collecting were primarily aesthetic in nature. His personal aesthetic ideals were in the paintings he collecting and created, not in the objects he collected to decorate his interiors.

69 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 20. 70 Suijver and Donders, Mesdag & Japan, 40. 48

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Figure 11. Eighteenth-century helmet (hwm0552) that was later decorated with an incised silver dragon motif. Mesdag was not concerned with reconciling the artistic production of Japan into the study of art history, which was a topic that concerned some collectors and enthusiasts, particularly in France. In the 1880s when writing about his travels in Japan a decade earlier, Philippe Sichel, with his lack of knowledge in the Japanese language and local systems of knowledge preservation, believed that the history of Japanese art would be written by Westerners. Fifty years later with the benefit of hindsight and improved knowledge of Japan, Raymond Koechlin wrote that the Japanese had been decisive in writing the history of their art.71 The reality is that historical Japanese artistic values were adapted and manifested through Western theories of art history, such as Tadamasa Hayashi’s publication for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Hayashi had assisted Louis Gonse in the research of L’art Japonais of 1886, and Hayashi in turn drew on the ideas of Gonse with regard to the hierarchy of fine and decorative arts.

71 Put et al. Plunder and pleasure, 25. 49

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Figure 12. Mesdag’s studio. Collecting Japanese objects in the late nineteenth century is most associated with Japonism, which can give the impression that Japan had a predominant position in the Western art world at that time. Put cautions against this impression by showing that by the centenary of the influential Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1959, only 23 out of 5,643 articles had

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been published about Japanese art. Based on his research into the auction catalogues and collection descriptions in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, he ventures the analysis that collectors of Japanese art tended to have “‘modern’ tastes,” whereby they also collected Impressionist, Islamic, medieval and eighteenth-century Rococo art.72 This observation applies to Mesdag also, who, though conservative in his appreciation of painting, was quite progressive in his taste for ceramics, as seen in his Colenbrander collection. Raymond Koechlin in his Souvenirs recounts how after the highlight of the Imperial treasures seen on display at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, collectors realized how much of their Japanese collections were inferior by those standards. At the turn of the century, the renowned collections of the most important dealers and collectors went to auction, and many were broken up to go to museums. The Japanese collections of the Goncourt brothers were auctioned in 1897, followed by Hayashi Tadamasa in 1902 and 1903, and Siegfried Bing in 1906. Collectors turned to ancient Chinese and Scythian artefacts that were coming onto the market for the first time. Mesdag’s Japanese collection is one of opportunity rather than purpose. While his general outlook as an art collector provided a certain coherence to the type of objects he was interested in, his lack of engagement in the culture of provenance of these objects separate him as a collector from those examined previously. The next generation of collectors of Asian artefacts in the Netherlands came after his death with the formation of the Vereniging van Vrienden der Aziatische Kunst in 1918 in The Hague. This group shows the influence of contemporary trends in Asian collections, esteeming antiquity and scholarly knowledge. Ancient Chinese and Indian objects were collected as archaeological studies increased knowledge and availability. These collectors prized specific and profound knowledge of categories of objects such as tea bowls or bronzes, influenced by the scholarship that was recently available about these aspects of Japanese culture and history. Mesdag’s Asian collection is representative of the type of fashionable collecting practice of his time, driven by his own personal aesthetic interests. Hendrik Willem Mesdag was a businessman and an artist who formed and consolidated his collection as a museum through his connections in these circles. Mesdag was motivated only by aesthetics and did not show any interest in what could be used in ethnographic study. The significance of the Mesdag Japanese collection is today more important than it had been earlier in its existence, due to it being under the management of

72 Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 16. 51

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm the Van Gogh Museum, which has the Japanese print collection of Vincent Van Gogh. Mesdag took great care in everything relating to his collection and museum, but he did not view his Asian collection with the same reverence as he did his picture collection. As a private collector, his Japanese collection is eclipsed by the individual Milanese collectors who travelled to Japan and particularly by the following case study of Count Bardi, in terms of breadth, knowledge and scale.

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Chapter 4: Venice – Travel and Diplomacy

Venice had a strong connection with Asia since the Middle Ages, economically as an important port of the Silk Road, and culturally with the popular thirteenth-century travelogue of Marco Polo. The legacy of the historic connections of Venice with the Near East was to be seen in the Byzantine-influenced architecture, and famously in the four bronze horses taken as plunder from Constantinople and displayed on the roof of St Mark’s Basilica. In 1221 Venice had signed a trade treaty with the Mongol Empire, mostly for raw materials, whether for daily use or as luxuries. Chinese export porcelain at this time was designed for the Islamic market, and commodities moved step by step along the Silk Road. This was a time of external and internal strife for Japan, with the Mongol Invasions in the second half of the thirteenth century and the Warring States Period until the early seventeenth century. These circumstances precluded the collection of Japanese material culture until direct contact was made by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. The Museum of Oriental Art in Venice came into being in the 1920s, motivated by the wish to have a museum which referenced the city’s long connection to the East.73 The museum was inaugurated as the Marco Polo Museum of Oriental Art, but had no connection whatsoever to the historic traveller. Instead it was based on the collection of Count Bardi who travelled around the world in the late 1880s. The majority of his collection came from Japan, with significant amounts from China, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. His family had lost much of its decorative patrimony due to financial difficulties, so his world trip had the goal of renewing the family’s lost collection, as well as satisfying the count’s wanderlust.74 This explains why there is a mixture of the type of Oriental furnishings that would have been seen in houses in the eighteenth century, and his own interest in Japanese customs and warrior culture.75 Henry of Bourbon, Count of Bardi (Enrico di Borbone, conte di Bardi), was born in 1851, son of Charles III, Duke of Parma, and Louise Marie Thérèse d'Artois. In “Notes on the Japanese collection of Count Bourbon Bardi at the Museo d'Arte Orientale di Venezia,” the authors give the count’s nationality as Austrian, but incorrectly state that he was related to

73 This chapter is based on the author’s paper “International Orientations” (Museum Studies Excursion: Contemporary Issues, 2016). 74 He also later travelled to Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya in 1891-1892. 75 Kinkô, 12-13. 53

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the Habsburg family through his mother.76 Louise Marie Thérèse was the daughter of Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, not of Austrian Emperor Francis I, the father of Marie Louise, who became Duchess of Parma in 1816 in accordance with the Congress of Vienna. After her death in 1847, the duchy was returned to the House of Bourbon. Henry was related to the Habsburg family through his first marriage to Maria Luisa of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, daughter of Maria Teresa of Austria. With his second wife, Adelgundes of Braganza, and a small cortège, Henry undertook a tour du monde, for the purpose of visiting Asia, and Japan in particular. He departed from Trieste on 16 September 1887 and returned via the United States to Southampton on 16 December 1889. In Southeast Asia he visited Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, Singapore, Penang, Rangoon (Yangon), Mandalay, Kuala Lumpur, Saigon, Angkor, and Phnom Penh. In October 1888 he moved to Hong Kong and from there spent five months in China travelling from Shanghai to Beijing and the surrounding areas. From February 1889 he spent eight months in Japan, arriving in Nagasaki and visiting many places in Kyushu and central Japan before settling in Tokyo for approximately one month. The count then continued his travels in central Japan and further north to the island of Hokkaido. The extent of his travels, as documented in the detailed diary entries of his secretary, shows his personal interest in the local cultures and the processes of modernization. In Japan especially, the count and his wife travelled off the main routes, visiting new schools and factories, as well as traditionally important places such as remote waterfalls, and made efforts to eat local food and practice traditional etiquette. The count’s journey was a personal adventure of exploration and collecting, but at each step of his trip he was given a welcome befitting an official. His reception in Tokyo was exceptional for the visit he received from Emperor Meiji who called upon him in person. Spadavecchia suspects that this was to promote friendship and cooperation between the “casa d’Austria” (house of Austria) and Japan.77 In addition to the promotion of Japanese cultural products in International Exhibitions as a diplomatic tool, individual collectors were also agents of diplomacy. On a political level, Japan was subject to the imperialist forces exerted by foreign powers. Through gunboat diplomacy, the United States had forced a reluctant Japan to open its borders, and thereafter to sign treaties, such as the Ansei treaties of 1858,

76 Isao Kumakura, Josef Kreiner, Tomoe Kreiner, and Johannes Wilhelm, “Notes on the Japanese collection of Count Bourbon Bardi at the Museo d'Arte Orientale di Venezia,” National Museum of Ethnology Repository 25, (2001): 644. 77 Fiorella Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale: la collezione Bardi : da raccolta privata a museo dello Stato, (Venezia: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1990), 16. 54

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which granted such privileges as extraterritoriality and low export-import tariffs. European states quickly followed suit. At the beginning of the Meiji period, Japan was weaker militarily and economically, due to the upheaval in social structures, and exchanges were biased in favour of the intruding nation. Japan did succeed in controlling its image to the extent of exploiting European fascination to benefit its manufacturing industry, including its production of artistic objects. By the end of the century, Japan had succeeded in changing its unequal treaties with American and European powers to remove extraterritorial privileges, signed its own favourable treaties with Korea, was victorious in the Sino-Japanese war and had gained Taiwan as a colony. It is estimated that the total amount of objects collected by the count and his wife on their travels was around 30,000.78 Japanese objects comprised half of the total collection, with 30% from Southeast Asia (mainly Indonesia) and 20% from China. The Indonesian collection consisted chiefly of batik fabrics, wayang shadow puppets and kris daggers. Many bronze Buddhist statues were collected in Southeast Asia, and one particularly prized item was a basalt Khmer Bodhisatva from the tenth or eleventh century. Most of the Chinese collection was made up of textiles and costumes, porcelain, lacquerware, religious statues, and scroll paintings. In Japan, the count collected objects almost exclusively dating from the Edo period (1603-1868), but did collect a wide variety within that time frame. His personal interest lay in samurai culture, which is demonstrated in the portraits he had commissioned of himself in samurai armour and kimono (see Fig. 13). His collection of armour and weaponry is surpassed only by that of Stibbert in Florence, containing full suits of armour, helmets, swords and daggers, arrows and quivers, and saddles and stirrups. Spadavecchia divides the Japanese collections into three categories: dynastic collections, objects of informed taste, and those of anthropological interest.79

78 Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 29. 79 Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 21. 55

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Figure 13. Count Bardi portrayed as a samurai. The armour and weaponry fits into the first category along with porcelain and tobacco sets as part of decorative objects connected to family heritage. The second category refers to the artistic eye of the collector, which in this case is informed by the fashionable interest in Japan and Japonism. In this category are lacquerware, prints, folding screens and textiles. Finally, the count also expressed his interest in anthropology by collecting items related to the scientific study of Japanese crafts and customs, such as house and boat models, figurines, and musical instruments. Henry and his wife were both personally active in selecting and acquiring objects for their collection. Heinrich von Siebold, who was based in Tokyo at that time, may have advised them on some of their Japanese acquisitions.80 As we have seen from his connection to the Museum of Applied Arts and possibly Siegfried Bing in the 1870s, Heinrich von Siebold was an important intermediary for collectors of Japanese objects. He often advised visiting collectors, and in 1893 assisted Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand with his collection. From a European perspective, Meiji Japan was seen to be in a state of transition from a feudal society that evoked parallels with Medieval Europe, to an industrialized power.

80 Kumakura et al., “Notes on the Japanese collection of Count Bourbon Bardi," 645. 56

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There was admiration for Japan’s ability to adopt foreign technology to outstrip China militarily and in manufacturing. With regard to its artistic production and social values, critics lamented the loss of Japan’s traditional culture. Philippe Sichel, a Parisian art dealer, was critical of what he saw as the new avaricious class of merchants in Japan, selling off their cultural heritage. The traditional Confucian social structure was abolished, along with the sumptuary laws that had been in place to prevent the wealthy merchants of the lowest stratum of that hierarchy from displaying a more luxurious appearance than the upper classes. Japanese merchants were the intermediary between the insolvent aristocracy and the foreigners with the capital to purchase their collections. The political and social reforms of the period had a significant effect on the movement of cultural property. As previously discussed in relation to the availability of Japanese Buddhist statues with the suppression of Buddhism, financial hardship released previously unavailable and valued items. With the centralization of government, the daimyō feudal lords had to relinquish their control of the provinces, and were then granted the administration of the newly-created prefectures, under the authority of the emperor. The change in status affected many daimyō and samurai families, and some of them were obliged to part with their heirlooms. There is debate in how much of this elite patrimony was released onto the market compared to contemporary objects produced to appeal to Western perceptions of feudal Japanese culture. Raymond Koechlin repudiated the idea held by Sichel that temples and daimyō families emptied their treasure holdings to the Western market, yet nevertheless previously unavailable objects did make their way to the market.81 On his return to Venice, the count employed the antiquarians Antonio and Giovambattista Carrer to arrange the display of his collection on the top floor of the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi where he lived. By 1900 the collection was open to the public. Objects were displayed according to shape, provenance and material, with the aim of displaying as much of the large collection as possible. Some objects were displayed in cabinets and others on the floor and in the corridors. Every available space in the cabinets was filled and the objects arranged symmetrically. The display of the armour and weapons shows the influence of Western displays of similar objects, and the filled cabinets correspond more to the treasure hoards of antiquarian shops than to the asymmetric and spacious display practices in Japan (see Figs. 14-17).

81 Put et al., Plunder and pleasure, 52. 57

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Figure 14. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi.

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Figure 15. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi.

Figure 16. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi.

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Figure 17. The Bardi collection in Palazza Vendramin Calergi. With the count’s death in 1906, his widow entrusted the collection to a Viennese antiquarian by the name of Trau. Trau commissioned Justus Brinckmann of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg and his assistant Shinkichi Hara, who had previously done research on the Leiden Buddha statues, to partially inventory and catalogue the collection. The Soprintendenza, with the support of the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (Ministry of Public Education, 1861-1929), made inquiries about purchasing the collection, but did not

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Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm have funds available for the 1.8 million lira price. It was put up for sale, not at auction, but through private agreements, from November 1907 until December 1914 at the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi. The sale was constrained by laws which prevented the exportation of cultural property. In 1908 Corrado Ricci, Director General of the Ministero, advised the Ufficio Esportazione (Export Office) that should the entire Trau collection be presented, it should be blocked. In 1909 Adelgundes asked the ambassador of Austria to intercede on her behalf to request permission from the Ministry to export some of the Japanese objects in the collection.82 The Ministry refused to grant the countess preferential treatment, however, it also rejected a comprehensive block on the export of the collection. It was known to the Soprintendente and the Ufficio Esportazione that Trau was sending parts of the collection to his office in Vienna, but there was no official acknowledgement or documentation of what or how much was unofficially exported. The Ufficio did grant individual export licenses for purchases of small lots of objects. During the seven years of the sale, Palazzo Vendramin Calergi became a place where members of the nobility, art connoisseurs, artists and representatives of museums, could visit regularly, to browse and possibly buy objects. About 300 purchasers are documented, with private buyers acquiring ornaments, clothing, porcelain and lacquerware, while museums acquired objects suitable for their collections. Private buyers ranged from Signora Fortuny (either the mother or wife of fashion designer Mariano Fortuny) who visited five times and bought twenty pieces of Chinese clothing and lacquer boxes, to Gordon Craig (theatre actor, director and designer) who bought Javanese wayang shadow puppets. In Orientalism, MacKenzie emphasizes that the fascination for Japan that is associated with avant-garde artists and elite collectors, permeated society in ways that are often overlooked in studies. Japan was burlesqued in the theatres and commercialized through fashion and furnishing, and postcards sold at exhibitions and at street corner stationers. The private buyers of Bardi’s collection shows this range in how Japanese culture was consumed. Ethnographic museums showed the most interest in the collection. Justus Brinkmann bought porcelain, netsuke and tsuba with other sword hilt parts for the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, and the Museum für Völkerkunde of that city also obtained some Burmese and Ainu objects. What is now the Übersee-Museum of Bremen was also in contact with Trau, although its purchases are not documented. In Italy, the Museo Etnografico in

82 Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 29. 61

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Rome purchased 87 pieces, twenty of which were wayang puppets. In Venice, the Istituto d’Arte purchased books, design albums and bronzes as teaching materials. The Museo Correr also purchased cloth pattern books, cloisonné glass and ten wayang figures. In 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, the liquidation of the Bardi collection was frozen, along with all other assets belonging to subjects of enemy states in Italy. In 1918, Pendini of the provincial Intendenza di Finanzia formally seized the collection as part of the general seizure of property in Italy belonging to citizens of Germany and Austria. Soprintendente Gino Fogolari, head of the Ufficio Esportazione, wrote to Pendini in that year, referring to the previous attempts by the State to acquire the collection in 1908 in order to establish at least a small oriental museum.83 Spadavecchia, who carried out extensive research on the collection in the 1980s, contrasts the Bardi collection with that of Edoardo Chiossone, a painter and engraver who lived and worked in Tokyo between 1872-1898. Chiossone collected Japanese paintings and prints from a long chronological period, and his artistic eye and long period of residence in the country allowed him to build up a refined collection with the view of it becoming a public museum. By comparison, the Bardi collection is characterized by the prevalence of works from the Edo period, a lesser selection of materials, and for the presence of objects of purely ethnographic value.84 During the acquisition by the state, however, it became a collection of Oriental art, from which was removed every trace of ethnographic focus.85 The sheer quantity of objects collected by Bardi, in a wide range of areas, is consistent with the Wunderkammern of earlier centuries. Italy, and in particular Rome, has some of the earliest examples of Japanese objects in collections due to its status as the seat of the Catholic Church. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) established a Wunderkammer at the Roman College in 1651, housing some Japanese objects relating to the missions in previous decades. Items such as Japanese swords were displayed as witness to the persecution suffered by Christians under Tokugawa rule. During following centuries with restrictions on foreigners entering Japan, relatively little arrived in Italy from Japan, other than ceramics and lacquered furniture which comprised the Dutch export trade via Amsterdam. After the lifting

83 “[F]ormare a Venezia almeno un piccolo Museo Orientale,” Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 41. 84 “[S]i caratterizzava per la netta prevalenza di opere del periodo Edo, per una minore selezione dei materiali, per la presenza di quegli oggetti di valore esclusivamente etnografico, di cui si è detto,” Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 77. 85 “[R]accolta d'arte orientale, da cui si è voluto deliberamente eliminare quanto di etnografico sussisteva attraverso i depositi, mirando ad una definizione quanto più possibile artistica della raccolta ... si è realizzato così un museo dell'arte giapponese del periodo Edo, con una sezione cinese (tre sale) ed una indonesiana (una sala),” Spadavecchia, Museo d'arte orientale, 81. 62

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm of restrictions in the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese collections made their way to Italy via missionaries who collected ethnographically, and through wealthy individual collectors. Venice lacked the contemporary connection to Japan that Milan enjoyed, but even by the standards of the many and rich collections found in Milan, the Bardi collection overshadowed them in scope and content. The breadth of its scale, ranging from naturalia to figurative art, has more in common with cabinets of curiosities than with the particular focuses of contemporary collectors. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was common for collectors to concentrate on a particular area of interest when collecting Asian objects. Émile Guimet collected mainly Japanese Buddhist art, as did William Anderson, and eventually also paintings. Frederick Stibbert continued his focus on armour and weaponry when he collected from Japan, and as we have seen Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s main interest in Asian art was in ceramics and bronze work. In the eight months of Bardi's stay in Japan, he collected enough to create an encyclopaedia of Japanese culture, in which his personal interests in armour and ethnography was visible. After his death the contents of his collection were dispersed, informing the holdings of many different types of museums and institutions, from museums of ethnology and university departments of anthropology, to natural history museums, art museums and state offices. Private collections are curbed by personal interest, availability, finances and space. Public collections are defined by these aspects, in addition to the demand to justify the selection of objects compatible the museum's mission. A collection’s history may be broader than the setting within which it can be seen today, which can give the impression that collecting practices were always focused upon a particular aspect of Japanese culture. When the collections are divided and arranged according to disciplinary interests of museum directors and curators, this replaces the personal view of the original collector. The private collections of individuals then proceed to inform the cultural views of the public through demarcated subjects of ethnology, art and design. The collection of Henry of Bourbon is a nobleman’s travel collection, one marked by his personal interests in traditional Japanese culture and decorative arts. The formation of the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice based on his collection was markedly different to the one displayed by Bardi in Palazzo Vendramin Calergi. Much of artistic interest was acquired by private buyers, and a significant amount of what could be considered ethnographic content was bought by museums in Germany and later deaccessioned by the museum in order to keep the collection closer to the mission of the museum as one of art. The musealization of Bardi’s collection involved the division of the assortment of objects from its original coherence as a 63

Aesthetics and Ethnography Maria Montcalm travel collection of the 1880s into sets which could be accommodated in ethnographic and art museums. Material culture from minorities in Japan, such as Ryukyu and Ainu, were actively sought after by museums of ethnography or sent to anthropological departments, being seen as lacking the aesthetic qualities needed for an Asian art museum. The Bardi collection was the largest collection out of all the case studies examined, and its division in the years after his death illustrate the issues that museums had in categorizing the material culture of Japan, particularly the classification into art and ethnography.

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Conclusion

The collection of Japanese material culture by non-Japanese collectors removes it from its context, and changes its original meaning, or at the very least gives it an additional layer of meaning. Europeans had unprecedented access to Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the arrival of diplomats, businessmen, missionaries and travellers brought various perspectives and interests in Japanese culture. This culture could be experienced there in a limited way by those visitors, but much was brought back and sold, or directly sent to Europe to be sold by dealers. European visitors had many privileges as collectors; even the not-so-wealthy could afford to purchase in bulk objects prized for their craftsmanship due to favourable exchange rates, and extra-territoriality clauses allowed them freedom of movement. The early years of the Meiji era released some cultural patrimony into the market with the closure of temples and the impoverishment of some noble families. These were sold to collectors who were there in the first decade, but the availability of pre-Meiji era objects was soon overtaken by contemporary manufacture dedicated to this export market. Export production is not native material culture, but it is an important aspect of interaction between cultures and shows a reaction to outside perceptions of a cultural identity. China and Japan had been creating identities in their export ware as long as there were external markets with which to trade, and this is particularly clear in ceramics. China had a much longer history of adapting its ceramics to its nearby export markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and its adaptations to European tastes helped in the construction of chinoiserie. Obsession with Asian ceramics led to the development of a European industry which by the mid-nineteenth century had saturated the market enough to produce its own export ware for Asia. In this respect the creation of the Orientalist image was a collaborative effort. The issue of self-orientalization is very significant with regard to Japan during the Meiji period. In the beginning of this period, an identity was developed in order to increase industrialization and control the country's representation internationally. This identity of a culture with a long tradition of aesthetic values and technical craftsmanship created value for Japanese material culture. There was undoubtedly a system of aesthetics and craftsmanship particular to Japan, but the government and industry recognized those aspects which satisfied European expectations of Japanese art and crafts. In the booming production of export ceramic and bronze ware, orientalizing motifs of dragons, waves and flowers were made prominent, and this extravagant ornamentation also allowed for the emphasis of technical skills such as glazing and casting. This applied also to the trade

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of pre-Meiji era objects, such as with the addition of an incised silver dragon into the samurai helmet in the Mesdag collection. This identity was cultivated by Japan to enhance its cultural cachet during a time when it was weak economically and militarily. At the end of the century, this orientalised version of Japan was understood by Western collectors to be part of a Meiji society corrupted by Western influence. By this time, Japan had developed its military, and the economy had stabilized. The increase in European knowledge of Japan and the accessibility, if not availability, of pre-Meiji era cultural artefacts contributed to a change in collecting practices towards specialization. These later collections eschewed pure aesthetics and ethnographic functions for a scholarly interest encompassing aesthetics and cultural knowledge. The power dynamics of the Meiji era were not limited to European nations as colonizing forces exploiting the riches of Japan, nor of Japan as an industrializing force capitalizing on the fascination with its culture to improve its economic and military capabilities. Japan was emerging as a colonizing power in East Asia during this time and profited directly from military victories over neighbouring countries, and from the boost to Japan’s international image as force to be reckoned with. The complications of Japan’s position within the Orientalist paradigm, provide a multifaceted picture of the East Asian context. With regard to the collectors who travelled to Japan, aesthetic interest was mixed with a genuine curiosity for Japanese culture. This curiosity was not scientific, but it was ethnographic in the sense of creating a personal description of Japanese culture based on the traveller’s experiences in the country. The Bardi collection makes no attempt to classify aspects of Japanese culture in an ethnographic way, but its breadth covers a wide range, from traditional Japanese fine art, to objects made and used by minority groups. The collections of the Milanese travellers are smaller in scale and show interests specific to the collectors themselves, but are representative in collecting trends at the time. Giussani was someone who became accustomed to Japanese culture during his years living there, and his collection was designed to give an overview of the culture. He collected widely and carefully, but what is telling about the musealization of his collection, is that he donated objects which he considered to be of significant artistic or technical value to Sforza Castle, and gave objects of everyday life to his nephew, which were reunited with the rest of the collection decades later. Giussani had both aesthetic and ethnographic interests in Japan, but in the early years of the twentieth century when the City of Milan was rearranging and

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defining its civic museum, Giussani decided to classify his collection into aesthetic and ethnographic objects, and donate them separately. The rise of ethnology as a scientific discipline, one that was connected to ethnographic collections in museums, is more often associated with material culture from colonized regions in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas. During the Meiji period, Japan was not explored ethnographically in the same way it had been in the early nineteenth century. Ethnographers were exploring regions which had heretofore been inaccessible or unknown to them. By comparison, Japan became quickly accessible to visitors and resulted in an abundance of travelogues, which complemented the aesthetic interests of Japonism in Europe with a popular type of ethnographic examination. Aesthetics were the most prominent preoccupation of Japonism through visual art and literature, and this interest informed the selection of objects that came into dealers’ possession in Europe. The collections of the National Museum of Ethnography, Leiden, and that of Hendrik Willem Mesdag were both acquired from dealers based in Europe, and the acquisitions were often made without contextual knowledge. This can be seen from the later discovery of the provenance of the Buddhas from the Tokugawa Mausoleum by the National Museum of Ethnography after their acquisition with the help of Shinkichi Hara. The Museum of Ethnography, Leiden, is unique for its foundation on Japanese material culture, but the Japanese acquisitions during the late nineteenth century are not indicative of purely ethnographic motivations. The acquisition of Buddhist bronzes is in line with Japonist collecting practices in France such as those of Cernuschi and Guimet. The objects entering the museum with ethnographic intent came mainly through people working in the Dutch colonies of Indonesia, and through connections with German ethnographers. In the case of the Milanese public collections, Japanese material culture sat uneasily within the ethnographic collections. The city had difficulty in collocating its Non-European Collections into one museum, and it had distinct issues with the Japanese collections. These were variously planned to become part of a museum of industrial art, as part of an Asian art department in the Sforza Castle Non-European Collections, or as part of an Oriental art museum. The Japanese collections are now fully integrated with the Non-European Collections in a museum of world cultures, but the many guises under which they have been displayed throughout their history show that this designation is artificial. The Milanese Japanese collections are typical of travel collections from this time and represent the interests of their collectors, including aesthetic and ethnographic, more than any classification given by a museum or department. 67

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The four collections used as case studies in this study display the extent to which interest in Japan extended throughout Europe, and in what form this interest took shape. Art and ethnography are the two most noticeable categories of how Japanese collections are exhibited in museums, and these divisions are related more to the intent of the museums in which they came to be housed. The way in which the collections are displayed today are often very different in focus from the interests of their original collectors. The purpose of the examination of four case studies from four cities is to establish patterns of collection and musealization in a broad sense. These collection overviews build up a larger picture of collection trends in the time period and places in question. Japanese material culture had an uncertain place in both museums of ethnography and art. As seen in the many variants of classification in Sforza Castle, the Japanese collections were sometimes considered art and sometimes ethnographic. The acquisition policy of the National Museum of Ethnography, Leiden, focused on aesthetic aspects of Japanese culture. Museums of Japanese or Asian art were the ideal for such collections, such as what became of the Bardi collection once what was considered to be ethnographic material was removed. Yet, aesthetic appreciation of Japanese objects was not thought of in the same manner as the appreciation of European fine art. The aesthetics of Japanese objects were compared to European crafts, particularly as the ceramics, bronzeware and lacquerware that were largely collected were seen as decorative objects with aesthetic qualities. This was the case in the Mesdag collection, where the types and style of Japanese objects contrasted starkly with his collection of paintings, yet showed similarities with his appreciation of Colenbrander's experimental ceramics. The historical context preceding and encompassing the acts of collecting, and the ensuing musealization of the following hundred years has had a profound impact on the current interpretation of the history of these collections. Japanese material culture was the focus of an aesthetic obsession in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Artists and connoisseurs, scholars and the general public had a fascination with the aesthetic qualities of Japanese culture. Ethnographic interest in Japanese culture was both academic and popular, with scholars publishing articles, and visitors publishing travel books. Interest in Japan encompassed both aesthetics and culture, and with the collections of material culture that were accumulated in Europe in this time, personal and public interests affected the representation of these objects.

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Image Credits

Figs. 1,2: Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam, reproduced in Montijn Kermis van Koophandel Figs. 3-5: Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, collectie.wereldculturen.nl Figs. 6,7: Lombardia Beni Culturali, http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/ Fig. 8: Gemeentearchief Den Haag, retrieved from http://uitdekunstmarina.nl/tag/mesdag- collectie/ Fig. 9: RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, rkd.nl/ Fig.10-12: The Mesdag Collection, reproduced in Mesdag & Japan exhibition catalogue Fig. 13-17: Museum of Oriental Art, Venice, reproduced in Spadavecchia Il Museo d'Arte Orientale

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