LAST UPDATED 1 SEPT 2017

Looking Closely at Color in 19^th-Century Nishiki-e

A One-and-a-Half-Day Workshop, October 20-21, 2017

Co-Sponsored by

Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art

Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture

Columbia University

This workshop will present new research and explore future initiatives in the history of the technical and material underpinnings of the Japanese color woodblock print (known both as nishiki-e for the multi-color technique, and ukiyo-e after the content). Most past work in this genre has focused on biographies of major artists, and on the connoisseurship of surviving prints, with less attention to the carvers and printers who produced the physical images, or to the materiality of the dyes and pigments used to create the striking colors. In this context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together academic historians of art and culture, museum curators, conservators, conservation scientists, ukiyo-e dealers, and print
collectors to focus in particular on the uses of color in nishiki-e.

The workshop will build on research over the past three years by Henry Smith in collaboration with Marco Leona, director of the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has focused on the scientific analysis of the colorants in a collection of over 100 nishiki-e dated from 1860 to 1900, assembled expressly for the purpose of tracking year-to-year changes. The analytical work has been conducted by Anna Cesaratto, and the first results have already been introduced in three published scientific articles.

One key aim in organizing the workshop is to establish a collaborative framework among four museums that have both strong ukiyo-e collections and advanced scientific research facilities. In addition to the local staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago will be represented by Rachel Freeman, a conservator of works on paper; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by research scientist Michele Derrick; and the British Museum by conservation scientist Capucine Korenberg.

The workshop will also be joined by two specialists from Japan who have done innovative work in this area: Furihata Chikako is curator of the Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo, who staged a series of exhibitions on the materials and uses of color in art over a period of 25 years, while Yamato Asuka is a research scientist in art conservation who produced an important study of 19^th-century nishiki-e colorants in her graduate dissertation at Tohoku University of Art and Design in 2012.

The workshop is open to all interested, with the encouragement of prior preparation by looking at the starred “most essential items” on the list of “Recommended Readings.” A link to the DropBox folder with all the recommended readings will be provided after you register. To register for the workshop, please send an email to Henry Smith hds2@columbia.edu. If the room capacity (East Asian Lounge, 403 Kent Hall) is reached before the workshop, a waiting list will be created. 

List of Participants

Organizer

Henry Smith, Professor Emeritus of Japanese History, Columbia University

Local participants:

John Carpenter, Curator of Japanese Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anna Cesaratto, Research Associate, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Marco Leona, Director, Department of Scientific Research, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Matthew McKelway, Professor of Japanese Art History, Columbia University

Jennifer Perry, Conservator of Japanese Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Invited international guests:

Chikako Furihata, Curator, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo

Capucine Korenberg, Conservation Scientist, British Museum

Asuka Yamato, Bokunindo Conservation Studio, Shizuoka

Invited Out-of-Town U.S. participants:

Michele Derrick, Research Scientist, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Rachel Freeman, Conservator, Art Institute of Chicago

Jeannie Kenmotsu, Assistant Curator of Japanese Art, Portland Museum of Art

Sandy Lin, PhD student, Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Shiho Sasaki, Conservator, San Francisco Museum of Art

Helena Wright, Curator of Prints, National Museum of American History

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE

PLACE:  East Asian Lounge, 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20:

MORNING SESSION, ca. 8:30 am-12:30 pm 

1. Jeannie Kenmotsu, “Beyond Nishiki-e: Color Printing in Illustrated Books” 
Discussant: Matthew McKelway 

2. Shiho Sasaki, “A Conservator’s View of the Changing Roster of Nishiki-e Colorants”
Discussant: Jennifer Perry 

3. Helena Wright, “What We Can Learn from the Tokuno Donation”
Discussant: Henry Smith

4. Asuka Yamato, “Questions I Still Have About the Colorants of Ukiyoe” 

Discussant:  Shiho Sasaki

AFTERNOON SESSSION, ca 2:00-6:00 pm

5. Michele Derrick, “The Discovery of Madder and Sappanwood in 18th-century Ukiyoe”
Discussant: Marco Leona

6. Anna Cesaratto with Henry Smith, “Meiji Purple, Meiji Red: A Timeline for the

Introduction of Synthetic Dyes into Japanese Nishiki-e”
Discussant: Capucine Korenberg

7. Sandy Lin, “The Creation of Kokka's Color Woodblock Reproductions and the

Competition with Chromolithography: 1889-1910"

Discussant: Rachel Freeman

8. Chikako Furihata, “Exhibiting Color: How to Stir Public Interest in Dyes and Pigments”

Discussant: John Carpenter

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21: Brainstorming for Future Projects on Color in Japanese Art

9:30 am to 12 noon. This wrap-up session is intended mainly for the participants (presenters and discussants), but we would more than welcome anyone else who attended the Friday sessions, and would like to join in a discussion about how to move forward with the study of color in nishiki-e and other forms of Japanese art.

Recommended Readings for “Looking Closely at Color in 19^th-c. Nishiki-e” Workshop

NOTE: All of the items listed here, with the exception of the last three,

will be made available as PDF files on DropBox to those who have registered for the workshop.

Bold = Authors who will be attending at the workshop

* Asterisk = Most essential items (Total = 9)

I. Primary sources

1878 * Takamatsu Toyokichi [高松豊吉,1852-1937], “On Japanese Pigments,” Graduating thesis, Dept. of Science, Tokio University, June 1878. 47 pp. This is an astonishing resource, and a remarkable achievement for a Japanese university student at the time. It was written under the guidance of Takamatsu’s mentor at the Imperial University, Robert Atkinson (1850-1929), a British chemist who was in Japan 1874-81. Takamatsu later studied further in England and Germany, and went on to become a leader in the field of applied organic chemistry in Japan, playing an active role in the international search for synthetic indigo in the 1890s. To the best of my knowledge, this pivotal resource has never been translated into Japanese, or closely studied in historical context.

1894 * T. Tokuno [Tokunô Tsûshô (Michimasa) 得 能通昌], “Japanese Wood-cutting and Wood-cut Printing,” in Report of the National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1892 (Government Printing Office, Washington DC: 1894), pp 221-44. Includes “Notes by the Editor, S. [Sylvester] R. Koehler, Curator of Section of Graphic Arts, pp. 232-44. Transcribed by David Bull at woodblock.com/encyclopedia/entries/011_02/011_02.html NOTE: Bull’s transcription shows links both to Koehler’s original notes (1-9, indicated by a preceding asterisk), and his own notes (indicated by [Ed. note],” a total of 12 notes but with no numbers in the text). This report accompanied a donation by the Japanese Bureau of Engraving and Printing to the U. S. National Museum (now the Smithsonian Institution) of a complete set of color woodblock printing tools (including pigments), and progressive prints of two different works. The entire collection now resides in the National Museum of American History, and only recently has it come to be studied in detail. Helena Wright, curator of graphic arts at the NMAH, is heading this effort, and will be at the workshop to report on its progress. The Tokunô report, like the Takamatsu thesis some two decades earlier, has never been translated into Japanese or studied closely by Japanese scholars.

II. Scientific research papers on nishiki-e colorants

1984 Robert Feller, “Identification of Traditional Organic Colorants Employed in Japanese Prints and Determination of Their Rates of Fading,” in Roger Keyes, ed, Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Catalogue of the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection (Allen Memorial Art Musuem, Oberlin College, 1984), pp. 253-66. This study appears to be the first effort to study systematically the colorants of Japanese woodblock prints, with a focus on fading rates. It was a pioneering effort, and still rewards close study.

2003 Elizabeth West Fitzhugh, “A Database of Pigments on Japanese Ukiyo-e Paintings in the Freer Gallery of Art,” in Elizabeth Fitzhugh & Marco Leona, Pigments in Later Japanese Paintings (Freer Gallery Occasional Papers, New Series, vol. 1, 2003), pp. 1-41. This important database was begun in the late 1980s, when many of the current techniques of analysis were not yet available, but it remains a crucial resource for anyone interested in the colorants of nishiki-e. To be sure, this data is for paintings, not prints, but virtually all of the artists recorded also designed prints. This 2003 version was the final redaction.

2002 * Shimoyama Susumu, “Colorants employed in Suzuki Harunobu’s prints ‘Night Rain on the Daisu’ and ‘Ki no Tomonori’: A Report on Non-Destructive Analysis,” in Chiba City Museum of Art and Hagi Uragami Museum, eds, Seishun no ukiyoe-shi Suzuki Harunobu: Edo no kararisuto (Chiba City Museum, 2002), pp. 298-99. Shimoyama was a pioneer in the analysis of organic vegetable dyes in Japanese prints, beginning in the mid-1990s to use the method known as “3D fluorescent spectroscopy” or EEM (excitation–emission matrix). This analysis of two Harunobu prints shows is one of a number of studies he had conducted, here available with an English-language version.

2003 Marco Leona and John Winter, “The Identification of Indigo and Prussian Blue on Japanese Edo-Period Paintings,” in Elizabeth Fitzhugh & Marco Leona, Pigments in Later Japanese Paintings (Freer Gallery Occasional Papers, New Series, vol. 1, 2003), pp. 57-74. This study represents Marco Leona’s early research on the colorants of nishiki-e, here in collaboration with John Winter, using fiber-optic reflectance spectroscopy ( FORS ), supplemented by infrared absorption spectroscopy and x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.

2005 * Shiho Sasaki and Elizabeth Coombs, “Dayflower Blue: Its Appearance and Lightfastness in Traditional Japanese Prints,” in Paul Jett, John Winter and Blythe McCarthy, eds, Scientific Research on the Pictorial Arts of Asia: Proceedings of the Second Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art (London: Archetype, 2005), pp. 48-57. This is the final form or research begun a few years earlier, and is the first study to take an intensive look at a single critical colorant in early nishiki-e, dayflower blue (known in Japanese, among other names,as aobana and aigami). They demonstrated for the first time that its widely alleged instability was due primarily to contact with moisture rather than light.

2016 Yanbing Luo, Elena Basso, Henry D. Smith II and Marco Leona, “Synthetic arsenic sulfides in Japanese prints of the Meiji period,” Heritage Science 4:17 (2016), pp. 1-6, This was the first article to result of the collection of Bakumatsu-Meiji nishiki-e assembled by Henry Smith, here focusing on orpiment, the dominant yellow of Japanese color prints from the 1830s on. The key issue is the detection of a synthetic version of the various arsenic sulfides that constitute orpiment, confirming that all nishiki-e from at least the 1860s and probably considerably earlier probably used the domestic product rather than the imported natural mineral from China, resulting in a likely drop in price. The Takamatsu report (above) offered crucial documentary evidence.

2017 Anna Cesaratto, Silvia A.Centeno, John R. Lombardi, Nobuko Shibayama and Marco Leona, “A complete Raman study of common acid red dyes: application to the identification of artistic materials in polychrome prints,” Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 48 (2017), pp. 601–609. This study was a major offshoot of the larger “Meiji Red” project to identify synthetic colorants in Meiji prints, for the first time identifying the several “acid red” dyes that appeared in about 1889 and quickly spread, probably influenced by the availability of dyes imported for use in chromolithography.

2017 * Michele Derrick, Richard Newman & Joan Wright, “Characterization of Yellow and Red Natural Organic Colorants on Japanese Woodblock Prints by EEM Fluorescence Spectroscopy,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 2017, pp. 1-23. Direct link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01971360.2016.1275438 This is the most recent, and in many ways the most surprising study of nishiki-e colorants to date, using the EEM technique for red and yellow organic dyes, and identifying the frequent occurrence of sappanwood (suô) and particularly madder (akane) in samples from early 18^th-century hand-colored prints into the first three decades of nishiki-e from 1765 .

In preparation: * Anna Cesaratto, Yan-Bing Luo, Henry D. Smith II and Marco Leona, “A Timeline for the Introduction of Synthetic Dyestuffs in Japan during the late Edo and Meiji periods,” to be submitted to Heritage Science. The current draft will be posted to the DropBox list in September.

III. Secondary studies in English 

1995 Henry Smith, “Blue and White Japan, 1700-1900: Indigo, Porcelain, and Berlin Blue in the Transformation of Everyday Life,” Ukiyo-e Society of America Newsletter, May-June 1995, pp. 1-4. This represents Smith’s first thoughts on the ways in which a particular hue could proliferate through the interaction of different colorants in different media, in this case indigo for cotton textiles, cobalt blue for porcelain, and Prussian blue for nishiki-e, to create a broad aesthetic of “blue and white.”

2002 Roger Keyes and Elizabeth Coombs, “Color as Language in Traditional Japanese Prints,” in Harriet Stratis and Britt Salveson, eds, The Broad Spectrum: Studies in the Materials, Techniques, and Conservation of Color on Paper (London: Archetype, 2002), pp. 184-89. This article offers some provocative ideas about different “palettes” in the history of ukiyo-e, depending on the relative values of “tonality” [hue, warm vs cool]), saturation [chroma], and light/dark [brightness, luminance]. Although not based on a scientific model of color space, it offers possibilities for combining subjective and objective approaches to color in nishikie.

2005 * Henry Smith, "Hokusai and the Blue Revolution in in Edo Prints," in John T. Carpenter, ed., Hokusai and His Age: Ukiyo-e Painting, Printmaking, and Book Illustration in Late Edo Japan (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), pp.  234-69. Originally published in Japanese as “Ukiyo-e ni okeru burû kakumei,” Ukiyo-e Geijutsu 128 (1998). This is the study that launched Smith into his current obsession with color in nishiki-e, growing out of earlier efforts to chart the broad history of Edo landscape prints, in which the introduction of Prussian blue came to seem increasingly important.

2005 * Shiho Sasaki, “Materials and Techniques,” in Amy Reigle Newland, ed., The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock Prints (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), pp. 324-350; section on ‘Colourants’ is pp. 333-37, with a useful table listing ukiyo-e colorants on p. 337. This is the most thorough effort to date to provide a reliable account of the techniques of traditional nishiki-e based on all available sources, and to catalogue the colorants of Japanese color woodblock prints.

IV. Works in Japanese

2012 *Asuka Yamato, “Ukiyo-e mokuhanga ni shiyô sareta shikizai no hensen ni kansuru kenkyû,” poster summary of key findings in MA thesis, Tôhoku University of Arts and Design, 2012. (An English-language diagram of the key findings will be provided for those unable to read Japanese.) This study represents a major breakthrough in the study of ukiyo-e colorants in the 19^th century. It is based on two different samples, one a collection of 33 datable actor prints from 1810-29, and the other a selection of prints by Hiroshige I, II, and III in the Hiroshige Museum in Tendô, Yamagata Prefecture. Yamato was the first to detect an abrupt change in the dominant red colorant of nishiki-e in early 1869, and to propose that it was most likely cochineal carmine that completely displaced safflower red (benibana).

2016 Meguro-ku Bijutsukan, Iro no hakubutsushi: Edo no shikisai o yomu, miru [English title: ‘The Anatomy of Colors: Look closely and read the stories of colors of Edo in Kuniezu and Ukiyo-e’], exhibition catalog, 2016. Organized and edited by Furihata Chikako. [No PDF available] This is the catalogue of an exhibition at the Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo, where Furihata-san is curator, that synthesized findings about the material origins of color in prints and paintings, beginning with Red in 1993, and proceeding with Yellow, Blue, and Green in the following decade. The catalogue includes an 18-page section cataloguing nineteen basic colorants in detail, with numerous color photos, as well as a thorough cataloguing of ten major painting treatises from 1637 to 1848, showing the terminology of each for the major colorants. The catalogue is entirely in Japanese, and it can be obtained only through the Meguro Museum of Art, but we hope to arrange an easy way to order it with the help of Furihata-san.

V. Basic Reference in English

1986-2007 Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, 4 vols, various editors (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986-2007). Vols. 1-3 are now available on Hathi Trust Digital Library. This essential series includes detailed scientific articles on the history, characteristics, and analysis of most painting pigments used worldwide, including eleven basic colorants used in nishiki-e printing: Vol. 1: Red lead [entan], Carmine (cochineal) [yôkô]; Vol. 2: Lead white [enpaku], Vermilion [shu], Calcium carbonate white [gofun]; Vol. 3: Orpiment [sekiô], Indigo [ai], Gamboge [tôô], Prussian blue [bero]; Vol. 4: Carbon black [sumi], Iron oxide [bengara]. Not covered are three major vegetable dyes used in nishiki-e: safflower [benibana], dayflower [aibana, tsuyukusa], and cork amur [kihada].

2008 John Winter, East Asian Paintings: Material Structures and Deterioration Mechanisms (Archetype Publications, 2008). [No PDF available] This is the current bible not just on color, but on all materials used the broad East Asian painting tradition, and an essential work of reference. Used copies in good condition can be found on Amazon for $55 and up, and new for $100. It is worth whatever you pay.