J.B. Millet Company
Chapter XIV (Part one) from Captain F. Brinkley’s Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese
Object Details
Artist
J.B. Millet Company
Date
1898
Medium
Album containing albumen prints with applied color Edition 19/250
Dimensions
Page size (each): 15 1/2 × 12 1/4 inches (39.4 × 31.1 cm)
Closed dims. (album): 16 × 12 1/2 × 1 1/4 inches (40.6 × 31.8 × 3.2 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Mrs. Howard S. Liddell
Object
Number
83.058.004
Brinkley’s lavishly produced multivolume set of books about Japan would not have been affordable t(…)
Brinkley’s lavishly produced multivolume set of books about Japan would not have been affordable to everyone, but would have appealed to elite tourists to Japan and well-to-do armchair travelers. Cheaper paperboard editions with only a few photographs per volume were also produced to meet the demands of the wider American audience’s enthusiasm for all things Japanese around the turn of the twentieth century. The text was written by various authors and edited by Brinkley to cover a broad range of topics about Japan, including discussions by the influential scholar Okakura Kakuzo about selected works of Japanese art. Okakura later served as a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (“American Sojourns and the Collecting of Japanese Art,” curated by Ellen Avril and presented at the Johnson Museum June 25–December 18, 2016)
