A photograph of Ernest F. Fenollosa.

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was born in Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A in 1853. He graduated from Harvard in 1874 with a graduate degree in philosophy, and studied art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School and the painting school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. With an introduction by Edward Sylvester Morse, he came to Japan in 1878 (Meiji 11). He took up a position as a professor at the University of Tokyo, where he taught political science, economics, philosophy, and sociology. While there he also studied and collected Japanese artworks and conducted a pioneering survey of treasures preserved in Kansai shrines and temples. He began giving enlightening lectures on the subject in 1881, and made a great impression the following year with his speech “The True Meaning of Art” (Bijutsu Shin-setsu), given under the auspices of the Ryūchikai, an art association. In 1884, he founded Kangakai, an art appreciation society, with Kanō Hōgai and other colleagues, with the aim of creating a new style of Japanese painting. Fenollosa, along with Okakura Kakuzō, also served as a member of the Ministry of Education’s Picture Survey Committee, and devoted himself to the promotion of art education and the administration of cultural property protection. From 1886 to 1887, Fenollosa traveled to Europe and the U.S. with Okakura and other artists to investigate European and American art, and upon returning to Japan, he became the executive secretary of the Tokyo Art School (now Tokyo University of the Arts). He taught pictorial elegance, aesthetics and art history at the Tokyo Art School since its opening in 1889. In 1890, he returned to the U.S. to become the Japanese Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Five years later, he divorced his wife Lizzie and remarried his assistant, Mary McNeil. In 1896, he came to Japan again and lectured on English language and literature at the Higher Normal School from 1898 to 1900, learning Noh from Umewaka Minoru and Takeyo and Chinese poetry from Mori Kainan, with Hirata Tokuboku as interpreter. (Fenollosa’s manuscripts of English translation were edited and published by the poet Ezra Pound.) After returning to the U.S. in 1901, he lectured on Japanese and Chinese culture throughout America. He died while in London in 1908.

Fenollosa, who grew up in Salem, a port town that had prospered in the East Asian trade from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, probably had his greatest exposure to Japanese art prior to his coming to Japan in the form of ceramics exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. That year, after graduating from the Graduate School of Harvard University, he attended the Massachusetts Normal School of Art, which had just been founded. While admiring the magnificent bronzes and ceramics, he spent several days at the Exposition Museum of Art studying contemporary oil paintings from Europe and America, especially Dutch landscapes.

After his arrival in Japan in 1878 (Meiji 11), he soon acquired an appreciation for Japanese painting, systematically collecting old paintings, and spent almost every summer in Kyoto and Nara, surveying the treasures of old shrines and temples. He eventually became deeply involved in modern art education and the administration of cultural properties in Japan. Fenollosa was undoubtedly inspired, the year after his arrival, by an exhibition of Japanese paintings collected by the British doctor William Anderson. This was organized by the Asiatic Society of Japan, and accompanied by Anderson’s lecture “A History of Japanese Art.” Furthermore, the cultural upheaval during this transitional period in Japan’s history meant it was a propitious period for the foreign art collector, and so Fenollosa was able to begin building a collection superb in both quality and quantity.

After the Meiji Restoration, temples were severely damaged by the Haibutsu Kishaku (the abolition of Buddhism) movement, and as a result of the abolition of feudal domains, the heirlooms of the former feudal lords and family treasures of hereditary painters were flowed out onto the streets. Fenollosa saw piles of damaged statues of Buddhas at Tōshōdaiji and Kōfukuji’s Chūkondō (Central Golden Hall) and Tōkondō (East Golden Hall). He was able to pick up a twelfth century Buddha head from an ash barrel at Daigoji; he found a Kannon-zu by Kanō Motonobu from the former collection of Marquis Hachisuka in the storehouse of Osaka Yamanaka Company and purchased it for 25 yen. He was handed down a picture of Prince Shōtoku by Takanobu, as well as a star mandala, when at Sumiyoshi Hirokata’s deathbed; both were heirlooms that had been passed down in the Sumiyoshi family for generations.

All of these sources are from Fenollosa’s own testimony, and can be found in this book. Of particular interest is his recollection of the third volume of Heiji Monogatari Emaki (illustrated stories about Heiji Civil War), which he considered the greatest masterpiece among the more than 1000 masterpieces deposited in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, after they were sold to Dr. Charles Goddard Weld in 1886. “This was formerly in the possession of the Honda family, and I had the privilege of studying it and photographing it more than once on the occasions of the loan collections of daimyos’ treasures held by the Art Club annually since 1882. I hardly thought then that some day this supreme work would fall into my own possession. The overcoming of the difficulties in its acquirement would form a romance in itself.”

A trial thesis on the History of East Asiatic Design had already been conceived in 1883 (Meiji 16). In the summer of the following year, while visiting ancient shrines and temples in Kyoto and Nara with Okakura Kakuzō and other members of a research team from the Ministry of Education, Fenollosa came into contact with many important examples, such as the Guze Kannon, which were being exhibited for the first time, and he noted their special significance because they “recovered the history of Japanese art from the 6th to the 9th centuries.” (In his letter to Morse, dated September 27, 1884).

In the same year, a critical review of his was published in the chapter on painting in Louis Gonse’s new book, L’art Japonais, marking him as an up-and-coming scholar who prided himself on being the “Schliemann of the Orient,” in contrast to his European predecessors whose views were limited to ukiyo-e and other early modern decorative arts. Upon his return to the U.S., Fenollosa pointed out the serious flaws in Anderson’s classification of paintings by country and subject, in Pictorial Arts of Japan (1886) and in his own book, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art he often makes fun of Anderson’s Western, realism-biased views.

In 1888 (Meiji 21), on the eve of his departure for a major joint research project on the treasures of the Kinai area including Kyoto and Nara (managed by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of the Imperial Household, and the Ministry of the Interior), Fenollosa wrote a letter to the editor of Harper’s Magazine offering to contribute a series of articles entitled “Oriental Paintings and Sculptures.” This was to be organized around historical periods and the rise and fall of the various schools, and the six titles in his offer clearly reveal the framework of the chapters of his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. He emphasized that the first four chapters (I. Early Korean and Japanese Art; II. Influence of Early Chinese Art on Japanese Art; III. Pure Japanese Art; and IV. Medieval Chinese Art) were in a field that had never been explored before. This emphasis reflects the idea at the foundation of his book: the initial rise of Japanese art could be dated to the Asuka and Nara periods and the peak of Chinese art came during the Tang and Song periods.

In a series of six lectures Fenollosa gave at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, in 1895, he divided Japanese art history into five periods (Nara, Fujiwara, Kamakura, Ashikaga/Momoyama, and Edo) and these five periods have remained more or less established ever since. The first period includes the Greco-Buddhist sculpture of northern India which influenced East-Asian art. In 1898, during his return to Japan, he wrote an article entitled “Outline of Japanese Art History” for Century magazine, in which he expounded on his explanation of “China as a source” of the fourth period and elaborated on the “Kōrin school” of the fifth period.

Around 1901–1902, he gave a series of slide lectures at Columbia University entitled “History of Japanese Art with an Introduction to the History of Chinese Art,” in which he described the history of art according to the representative genres of each period: I. Early Religious Sculpture (seventh–eighth centuries); II. Early Religious Painting (ninth–eleventh centuries); III. History Painting and Portraiture (twelfth–fourteenth centuries); IV. Landscape Painting (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries); and V. Impressionism, Realism, and genre painting (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries).

Fenollosa wrote a draft of this book in 3 months during the summer of 1906, holed up in his New York apartment. At this stage, he probably incorporated the latest discoveries from Sven Hedin and Sir Aurel Stein’s expeditions to Central Asia, as well as consulting new theories from China specialists such as Friedrich Hirth, Herbert Allen Giles, Terrien de Lacouperie, and later adding the first two chapters which discuss the influence of the Pacific and Mesopotamia on early Chinese art and Han dynasty art.

Each title and summary of the series of twelve lectures entitled, “Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art,” organized by the Yamanaka Company in New York the following year, serves as a guide to much of the contents of Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. The main difference is that in this book, China and Japan have respective, separate chapters, with two chapters each devoted to idealist art in each country, and the chapter on Ukiyo-e is truncated, while the last part of the lecture concludes by mentioning art education in the Meiji period, Kanō Hōgai and Hashimoto Gahō, and the Freer Gallery of Art, which accommodated the advice of Fenollosa.

Fenollosa had intended to return to Japan to make additions and corrections, but he died suddenly in 1908. His widow Mary therefore organized and edited his posthumous manuscripts. With the help of Ariga Nagao, a sociologist who had been Fenollosa’s former student and art research collaborator, and Kanō Tomonobu, a painter and connoisseur, she combined the manuscripts and added a long preface. The book, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, was published in two large volumes in London and New York in 1912. The edition which remains popular today is the revised edition of the following year, which includes copious notes on artists’ names by Professor R. Petrucci.

In 1913, the same year the revised edition was published, a German translation and an abridged French translation were also published, and the revised edition was reprinted in 1917 and 1921, followed by a reduced-size reprint by Dover Publications in 1963. It is puzzling that the cover of the paperback edition’s first volume features an illustration of an actor by Katsukawa Shunshō. For the author’s original intention was to enlighten the West’s biased view of Japanese art, which had been limited to ukiyo-e prints, and to introduce classical masterpieces, especially those of ancient times.

Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art is the first systematic work to treat Chinese and Japanese art as belonging to the same cultural current, according to period and style, and stands as the starting point for Japan’s art historiography. Although there are, of course, anachronisms and inadequacies that are obvious by today’s standards of specialized knowledge, due in part to the folklore and to scarce materials of the time, the basic framework of Japanese art history which Fenollosa established remains unchanged. One may well ask how many works on Japanese art from a global perspective have been written that surpass this book?

In 1880, 2 years after his arrival in Japan, Fenollosa discovered a Buddha statue amongst the accumulation of damaged Buddhas at Tōshōdaiji, which seemed to be a prototype of Greco-Buddhist art. He called the dry-lacquered Bodhisattva statue in the Hōryūji Denpo Hall “Caesar.” He saw traces of Greco-Roman classical art everywhere in the ancient capital, a manner of seeing from which much can be learnt. For example, the statue of the attendant bodhisattva inside the Great Hall, Kondō, at the Yakushiji may remind him of the Nike statue at the Louvre, and the statues of Nikkō and Gekkō bodhisattva in Sangatsudō Hall of Tōdaiji also reminded him of the Torso in the Parthenon and Venus de Milo. Further, the transition from the hard vertical lines of the Shaka trinity in the Hōryūji Kondō Hall to the flowing curves of the Amida trinity (thought to be a personal worship object of Lady Tachibana), may similarly remind him of the passage from Egyptian to Greek art.

For Fenollosa, his first impression of Shōsōin was “a second resurrected Rome, of the continental scale of an Asia.” Fenollosa may have been the prophet of the Silk Road boom of these days [the late 1980s].

Greek sculptures are to European art what landscape paintings during the Tang and Song dynasties are to East Asian art. Fenollosa writes, “The Wordsworths of China lived more than a thousand years ago.” He visited a famous Zen temple in Kyoto in search of artifacts from the Tang and Song dynasties, and spent several weeks with the monks at Tōfukuji, where his companions, Kanō Tomonobu and Sumiyoshi Hirokata, were given the opportunity to copy old paintings. Fenollosa reflects, “I felt like an unworthy, degenerate Noami privileged to appreciate the very treasures that had delighted his eyes 450 years before.”

The tradition of Zen Buddhist idealistic art from Hangzhou, which was transplanted and established in Kyoto by the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and Yoshimasa, was passed down through the Sesshū to the Kano school, the Shogunate’s official painters. Under Eitoku Tatsunobu, the head of the Kanō family, who was descended from Motonobu and Yasunobu, Fenollosa learned the way to appreciate ancient Chinese painting which had been introduced to the school together with a vast amount of reproductions, and he was allowed to take the Kanō name of Eitan Masanobu. Fenollosa was inspired to write this book by the unique opportunity he had to study the copies of Japanese and Chinese masterpieces made by Tan’yū and Yasunobu, and to take advantage of the results of Isen and Tanshin II’s reexamination of Chinese paintings.

Fenollosa traces the history of the Tang-Song art tradition to its conclusion in Japan. Hōgai, who was entrusted with reviving the Wu Dao-zi tradition, had long since died, and Tomonobu, the last painter to have studied at the Shogunate Bureau of Painting and the sole survivor of the Kanō family lineage, was already old and alone in his life. Kangakai, the art appreciation society Fenollosa created with them in 1884 (Meiji 17), to raise the standards of connoisseurship and criticism, was modeled after the Chinese Emperor Huizong’s Imperial art gallery, but “ours was merely stepping into its shadow and its shadow’s shadow again.” Even Sesshū, the supreme authority on Ashikaga art and the best translator of Chinese art, had to settle for sixth place on the list of East Asian masters.

Perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of this book is that the author’s own valuable art experiences are told with a vivid sense of reality. Together with Fenollosa, we hear the keys of the Dream Hall clang in the rusty locks, and then fearfully climb the treacherous stairs of Shōsōin. We can even scrape off some of the surface pigment to verify the now lost technique of murals of the Hōryūji Kondō murals! This sense of realism that pervades the book is probably due to the fact that his narrative is based on actual research notes (some of which are still extant). One would be hard-pressed not to feel a kinship with a foreigner who states about the Kitano Tenjin Engi Emaki (Jōkyūbon scroll on the foundation of the Kitano Tenmangū in Kyoto), “I have sat before these stupendous rolls again and again, with the flesh of my back creeping as during a Wagner opera and tears standing in my eyes.”

At a time when the literature-centered preoccupation with antiquity dominated art history circles at home and abroad, and Western prejudice undermined understanding of East Asian art and, more importantly, “the essential humanity” of the Chinese and Japanese, it was urgent for Fenollosa to write a history of East Asian art from a global perspective, emphasizing the commonalities between Eastern and Western art, commonalities which provided conceptual room for rich parallels. Before Fenollosa it would have been inconceivable to suggest that Prince Shōtoku is “the Constantine of Buddhism for Japan,” or “Fra Angelico and Yeishin Sozu” are “so much alike,” or to view Zeami as “the first Japanese Shakespeare,” and Hokusai “the Dickens of Japan.” Similarly, Unkei and Tankei can now be compared to Donatello and Michelangelo, and Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and Yoshimasa to Cosimo and Lorenzo Medici.

With the transfer of the capital to Heiankyō by Emperor Kanmu, the “Holy Kyoto Empire,” a union of politics and religion, represented by the Hieizan temple complex, was established, and at the same time as St. Francis of Assisi, there arose Saigyō, Shinran, Nichiren, and other itinerant high priests who preached the simple faith to the people of the land. Just as the deeds of Egyptian kings were carved in caves and those of Babylonian kings were painted in colored tiles on city walls, the Tosa school sought to portray heroic battles on fragile paper scrolls to immortalize them. The Rinpa school has been called “the true Japanese school of ‘impressionism,’” and the Genroku period, during which Hishikawa Moronobu, the founder of ukiyo-e, was active, has “much resemblance to the gay, roystering, unconscious mingling of lords and people in the Elizabethan days of Shakespeare, before the duality of puritan and cavalier divided them.”

Today, when the arts of East and West have come closer than Fenollosa had predicted, and the era of international simultaneity has arrived, the role of Japan, which he saw as “Greece in the East,” has become increasingly significant. For, to quote Fenollosa, we are “endowed by temperament to become the interpreter of East to West and of West to East.”