Bosuton de mitsukatta Hokusai ten: Bosuton Bijutsukan no hangi shinhakken

Uittreksel

"Ever since 1889, when the collections that were gathered in Japan by Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow and Ernest Francesco Fenollosa arrived in Boston the Museum of Fine Arts has been a great repository of ancient Japanese art. The sheer bulk of the collection--there are, to give only two examples, four thousand paintings and sixty thousand woodblock prints--makes it difficult for any one person to know all of its treasures. Consequently, time and again discoveries are made that, upon closer scrutiny of the archives, turn out to have been made much earlier by others but somehow fell into oblivion in the course of the one hundred and fifteen year old history of the Museum. The discovery of three sets of woodblocks by Hokusai is an example of such a discovery. For many years they were kept in the storage of our Department of Asiatic Art, properly stored and registered. There can be little doubt that my predecessor as a Curator of the Department of Asiatic Art, Mr. Robert Treat Paine, Jr., who was an expert of Ukivo-e prints of world wide renown, was aware of their existence and realized their importance. As the letter reproduced in this catalogue clearly indicates, Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, the great collector and benefactor of this Museum, was fully aware of the importance of what he acquired in 1889. A suggestion made by our colleague Laurence Smith of the Department of Oriental Antiquities of the British Museum, London, made us take a new inventory of these blocks, and thus we come to realize that they represent a complete set of blocks for three illustrated books by the great artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the Tōto Shōkei (scenic views of Tokyo), the Sumidagawa Ryōgan Ichiran (a view of both banks of the Sumida River) and Azuma Asobi (Edo Pastimes). Much research on the complicated bibliographical history of these masterworks of book illustration remains to be done. Yet there can be no doubt that these sets of woodblocks--to the best of our knowledge the only sets to have been preserved--constitute an important tool to elevate the study of the history of these famous books to a new level of scholarly accuracy. We are pleased that we found the Adachi Hanga Kenkyusho willing to undertake the challenging task of printing for us a new, fifth edition of these books. Copies of this splendid new edition will be made available to museums and libraries in Europe, Japan and in the United States in order that all who are interested in the study of the work of that creative genius, Katsushika Hokusai, may gain a first-hand and accurate impression of what has been preserved."-- Foreword by Jan Fontein.