50th Anniversary of dealing – Part 2

My days were tiring ones of walking around shops in both cities. Prints could turn up anywhere. Outside of the cities it was not unusual for me to be followed by a gaggle of children for whom I was clearly a source of curiosity and general amusement.

I attended various auctions in Japan and often I was the only foreign dealer. The auctions were smaller then and some were held in ryokans in locations such as Hakone. Some dealers wore old style Japanese clothes (montsuki kimono beneath the montsuki haori and hakuma with socks and sandals). Everyone sat on tatami mats, the prints were passed around and bids were written on slips of paper in cardboard holders which were then thrown to the auctioneer. It was considered polite to bid on every few prints even if you didn’t want them; this was a matter of some delicacy which entailed making a bid low enough so as not to buy the item, but of course not so low that it would cause offense. Payment was cash only. Nowadays the accounts are computerised but in those days we had one man who did all the accounting on an abacus and would match a computer for speed. The auction was followed by dinner and then a dip in the communal male pool with much joshing.

At that time there was little interaction between Japanese dealers (except at these small auctions) and it was quite possible to buy a print from one shop, walk down the street and sell it to another shop because the dealers never went into each other’s premises. Over the years this has changed – as has so much else. I have been in the business for so long, I find myself dealing with the sons, daughters and sometimes the grandchildren of the dealers I met when I first travelled to Japan. I think that the aptitude for dealing and most importantly a good ‘eye’ must be carried in the genes.

The modern successor to those auctions is the official dealers’ auction held a number of times a year in the centre of Tokyo. They are much larger affairs with more foreign dealers and the ‘shout bid’ system mainly being used.

Another specific area in which I had an interest, which I still have to this day, is Shijo material: books, prints and paintings. In those early days Shijo was not considered collectable or as appreciated as formal styles. This changed somewhat after the publication of Jack Hillier’s The Uninhibited Brush in 1979.

Over the years I have noticed that prints travel in circles and I occasionally buy back the same items. I was passing an antique shop in the centre of Tokyo one time when I saw a first edition Hiroshige hanging on the wall. On inspecting it I realised that I had previously owned it. It was a very fine print so I purchased it again from that antique shop. That print had travelled between Japan and Europe four times to my certain knowledge. As it was some time ago, I am not sure where it went onto when I sold it next – it could be anywhere by now, I just hope that it has been cared for and is still in good condition.

I have had the pleasure of selling to many fine collectors. Then, as now, people find pleasure in their prints in different ways. For many years I sold Hiroshiges to one collector. She was a charming, elderly lady who one day confided to me that, whilst she loved the landscapes, she didn’t really like the bright colours. She told me that she had arrived at a method to get the colour saturation just as she liked it: she placed the prints in full sun on her balcony with pebbles on each corner and left the colours to fade until she was satisfied. Whilst I remember her fondly I do wince when I think of mint condition prints being intentionally faded.

50th Anniversary of dealing – Part 1

I was fortunate that when I began as a dealer, it was at a time when prints were readily available and there was a wave of interest in Japanese art. I came to dealing after working as a professional photographer for a few years in London in the ‘swinging 60s’. I started buying and selling prints – initially book plates, Hogarth prints, maps and caricatures, I had a stall in an antiques market and was beginning to almost make a living. In 1968, by chance, I went into a shop just off Charing Cross Road that sold Japanese antiquities. On the wall was a print of a samurai by Kuniyoshi. I was familiar with engravings and etchings but I had never seen a printing technique like that. I was so excited by the print that I paid £40 for it – an extravagant price at that time! I put it on my stall in the Antique Centre near Selfridges. It took me three years to sell it and I made a big loss. This was the beginning of my education as a Japanese print dealer. I am often asked “How do I become a dealer?” My answer is: spend money, make mistakes, and keep learning.

It was then that I recognised the value of a good reference library and now I have hundreds of reference books and monographs on ukiyo-e artists which I use in my cataloguing. A few of the reference books that I refer to most regularly include are in blog [Selected Reference Titles] A word of warning: whilst most books illustrate genuine impressions – not all of them do!

In the 1970s, prints were, for the most part, affordable and relatively easy to find in London and the home counties. I used to take my car, an old Morris Traveller, to make buying trips around the countryside – I always found something to buy. (I still regularly make buying trips but now it means travelling worldwide.) Prints turned up in the most unusual places: two first edition Hiroshige snow scenes were found in the lining of a large wooden trunk in Scotland; decades later, I was offered an album of Kunisada that had been found sticking out of a dustbin in Hampstead!

By the late 70s I had moved my business from the antiques market into a small shared gallery off Bond Street. The gallery was on the ground floor and faced a restaurant across a narrow street. I could see diners enjoying their lunch and they could see me at work. One day a Japanese dealer came to see me. He selected a pile of prints, and after some negotiation we agreed a price. At this point in the story, the position of the restaurant diners becomes important. As the dealer prepared to pay me, he turned his back to me and (oblivious of the diners opposite), he dropped his trousers to expose long johns and somewhere between his legs a bag of cash. Across the road knives and forks froze in mid-air, all conversation and service paused while this corpulent dealer revealed a little bit more than his security arrangements.

                                                End

You may be interested to read further reminiscences from my early years of dealing in Part 2 which will soon go live on the website together with the 50th Anniversary special update.

Selected Reference Titles

Listed here are selected titles of reference books that I refer to most regularly – this is not an exhaustive list!

Asano, Shugo and Clark, Timothy, The Passionate Art of Kitagaway Utamaro, Asahi Shimbun, 1995

Forrer, Matthi and Goncourt, Edmond de, Hokusai, Rizzoli International Publications, 1988

Gentles, Margarent O., The Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints, Volume 2 Haranobu, Koryusai,Shigemasa, their followers and contemporaries , The Art Institute of Chicago, 1955

Gunsaulus, Helen C., The Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints, Volume 1 The Primitives, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1955

Hillier, Jack, The uninhibited brush, Japanese Art in the Shijo Style, Hugh M. Moss Ltd, 1974

Hillier, Jack, The Art of the Japanese Book, 2 volumes, Southeby Publications, 1987

Hirano Chie, Kiyonaga A Study of His Life and Works, Harvard University Press 1939

Keyes, Roger, The Art of Surimono, Privately Published Japanese Woodblock Prints and Books in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Southeby Publications, 1985

Keyes, Roger, The Art of Surimono, two volumes, Southeby Publications, 1985

Koop, Albert J., and Ianda, Hogitaro, Japanese Names and How to Read Them, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1923

Lane, Richard, Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print Including a Dictionary of Ukiyo-e, Oxford University Press, 1978

Mitchell, C.H., The Illustrated Books of Nanga, Maruyama, Shijo and Other Related Schools of Japan, Dawson’s Book Shop, 1972

Robinson, B.W., Kuniyoshi, The Warrior Prints, Phaidon Press, 1982

Schaap, Robert, Heroes & Ghosts, Japanese Prints by Kuniyoshi 1797 – 1861, Hotei Publishing, 1998

Suzuki, Juzo, Utagawa Hiroshige, The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 1970

Tamba, Tsuneo, The Art of Hiroshige, Asahi Shimbun, 1965

Turk, Frank A., The Prints of Japan, Arco Publications, 1966

Van den Ing, Eric and Schaap, Robert, Beauty & Violence, Japanese Prints by Yoshitoshi 1839 – 1892, Havilland Press, Society for Japanese Arts, 1992

Winter landscapes

Approximately 70% of Japan’s landscape is mountainous. In the past when travel into the mountains was difficult there was a large demand and great curiosity by the public to see those remote snow covered landscapes. Publishers and leading artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai responded to that demand by ensuring that every landscape set had at least one snow scene and, often, as in the 100 Views of Edo set, there were as many as seven.

Winter landscapes, because of their minimalist nature appeal to a modern aesthetic and are probably the most popular and expensive landscape prints to collect now. They most often show travellers in a snowy pass but we can also enjoy scenes of Edo (Tokyo) under deep snow. Tokyo’s location on the coast of the Pacific Ocean affords the city mild winters with cool spells. Snowfall does occur annually but it is sporadic and it seldom stays. Perhaps there were heavier falls one or two hundred years ago but more likely artists used snow imagery as a way to both emphasise the season and to transform both landscape and cityscape.

In ukiyo-e a number of techniques were used to suggest snow: areas of image were left blank or block cutters and printers created texture on the paper using gauffrage (blind-printing) in which the block is printed without pigment. This convincingly conveyed snow and is primarily found on prints of the Harunobu period and surimono both of which were printed using thick hosho which is ideal for blind-printing.

White pigment was also used: gofun which was prepared from powdered clam shells [calcium carbonate] or shiro prepared from white lead carbonate. Snowflakes could be cut into the blocks and printed; or gofun or shiro could be splashed from a brush onto the paper, or applied by using a right-angle pipette. It could also be applied by taking it into the mouth and spraying through the lips. Splashed pigment is also commonly used to suggest sprayed water.

The shiro usually oxidises over time so that in some prints it appears to be snowing black snow. This is the result of the print’s exposure to air borne acid pollution. Not all oxidation is unpleasant: it can give a print an attractive patina. Print collectors will have noticed another effect of oxidisation- the shiro was also mixed with red for flesh tones which is why one comes across blackened faces on some prints. Oxidation can be easily reversed by a restorer, and once professionally reversed will be stable.