[Rarebooks] fs: Important Oriental Arts Catalog (1925)

[Joslin Hall Rare Books]

Binyon, Laurence.  ASIATIC ART IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM (Sculpture and 
Painting).  Paris; G. van Oest: 1925.

A very interesting catalog, with an informative and frank introduction by 
Laurence Binyon, noted poet and Curator of Oriental Prints and Paintings at 
the British Museum. He describes at some length not only the strengths and 
deficiencies of the collection, but also candidly details the history of 
the British Museum's collecting of Asian arts.

At the time this catalog was written there was still not, in fact, a 
department devoted to Asian art at the British Museum. The Japanese, 
Chinese, Indian and other pieces were scattered amongst other departments, 
and chiefly treated as items of religious or ethnographic interest rather 
than art, a situation Binyon obviously found completely frustrating and 
indefensible.

Binyon was a champion of Eastern arts, having written "Painting in the 
East", the first book on the subject in English, in 1908. He was also a 
poet of note, and after leaving the British Museum he became the Norton 
Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He is perhaps best remembered 
today, at least in Britain, for his war poetry. A volunteer with the Red 
Cross on the Front during the First World War, his 'For the Fallen' was 
penned at the war's start, in September 1914. The poem's fourth stanza is 
inscribed on countless monuments across Britain-

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them."

 From the war Binyon returned to the arts, and brought his perceptive and 
sensitive mind to work on the problem of Asian arts at an often indifferent 
British Museum, which is where we find him in this catalog. Despite 
Binyon's obvious dissatisfaction with the state of affairs he helps 
oversee, he catalogs the Museum's truly fine holdings of paintings from 
China, Japan, Persia and India, and sculpture from China and India, with 
admiration and the care of a scholar and poet who loved the subject.

Hardcover. 11"x14", 74 pages of text plus 64 b/w plates; light 
soil.  [07790]  $150.00


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