Viewing Japanese Ehon (Picture Books) Across Boundaries: Seeing/Reading, East/West

Beloved throughout the world, Japanese color woodblock prints from the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods regularly appear on view at the world’s major museums. As such, however, it is easy to overlook their intimate relation to illustrated picture books (ehon) made by the same woodblock carving and printing methods. This presentation seeks to recover an integrated understanding of Edo and Meiji print culture, aguing that viewers at the time –both in Japan and the West–appreciated books and prints’ subtle and complex interactions with other media, including oral storytelling and performing arts.

Following an introduction to some illustrated woodblock-printed books and their functions, we will examine the perspectives of some of the most passionate collectors and appreciators of Japanese books in the late nineteenth through mid twentieth centuries: William Michael Rossetti, Edmond de Goncourt, Louise Norton Brown, Martin Ryerson, and Nakata Katsunosuke. By tapping into their enthusiasm, we can recover the holistic media ecology of nineteenth-century Japanese print culture. Finally, this talk will discuss current-day efforts to digitize, share, and translate Japanese illustrated books so that more people will gain access to books that are, as the New York Public Library once stated, “among the most beautiful and moving...ever created.”

Light lunch and refreshments will be served. Registration is encouraged but not required.

This event is part of the "Insight into Meiji Japanese Art, Books, and Prints" program, organized by Haruko Nakamura, Librarian of Japanese Studies, and Yoshitaka Yamamoto, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, in connection with an exhibition at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library curated by Nakamura and Yamamoto titled, "Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan." The exhibition is scheduled to take place on the 2nd floor of the Beinecke from September 2nd, 2025, to March 3rd, 2026.

Chelsea Foxwell is Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in 2008 from Columbia University. Her research considers Japan’s artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia and beyond and encompasses a variety of topics, from medieval handscrolls to tradition-based contemporary art. She is the author of Making Modern Japanese Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (2015) and co-author and co-curator (with Bradley Bailey) of Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan (2023). Foxwell is currently at work on a book that examines the circulation of visual information between books, prints, and paintings in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan, as well as a research project about art and photography during the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95).

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