Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/70

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Japanese Colour-Prints

of Hokusais in Boston. In Germany there are the collections of Koepping and Liebermann in Berlin, Stadler in Munich, Frau Straus-Negbaur in Frankfort-on-the-Main, Jaekel in Greifswald, Moslé in Leipzig, Oeder in Düsseldorf, Grosse in Freiburg (Breisgau), and others. The Berlin Print-Room has already been mentioned; the library of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum has since then tended more and more to become the central repository of State collections; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe at Hamburg possesses a number of prints, &c.; and in the Print-Room at Dresden the foundations of a collection have been laid.

Hand in hand with this increased interest in and comprehension of Japanese wood-engraving has gone the development of the literature on this subject (see the bibliography at the end). The first detailed and trustworthy information about the history of Japanese painting, as well as some notes on the history of the wood-engraving, was supplied by Anderson in his pioneer work, A History of Japanese Art, published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. vii. (1879); his work de luxe, The Pictorial Arts of Japan, in two volumes (1886), and the Catalogue of his Japanese and Chinese paintings acquired by the British Museum, which appeared at the same time, further elaborate the same material, while his Japanese Wood-Engraving, published in the May number of the Portfolio of 1895, condense it into a short, popular outline of the history of Japanese wood-engraving. Professor Gierke followed Anderson in 1882 with the Catalogue of the exhibition of his collection in the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum, which contained a short but comprehensive and exhaustive and quite independent survey of the history of Japanese painting; and in the following year came Gonse's L'Art Japonais, a monumental work in two volumes, the first comprising painting and wood-engraving, in which a first and not unsuccessful attempt was made to comprehend