[Rarebooks] FS: A Glimpse of Japanese Arts in 1876

[Joslin Hall Rare books]

Jarves, James Jackson.  "A Glimpse at the Art of Japan"

New York; Hurd and Houghton: 1876.

James Jackson Jarves, the Boston art critic who established Honolulu’s
first newspaper, was made a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy for
his art exhibition-related work there, and gave great portions of his
collections to New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Yale, was also, as far
as we can tell, the first American to write a scholarly book on the arts
of Japan.

This study, published just a few decades after Perry’s ‘black ships’ had
reopened the island at cannon-point, focuses on the aesthetic rather than
the technical aspects of the subject for, as Jarves notes in his
introduction, Japanese artists were often loathe to share technical
details with anyone, much less foreigners. Jarves covers the historical
origins of Japanese art, religious art, literature and poetry, the life
and home of the Japanese artist, and Japanese decorative and ornamental
arts with the sensitivity of the sympathetic and enthusiastic art critic
while always maintaining, somewhere in the background, that slightly
puzzled, cautiously superior air with which Europeans of the time regarded
the Japanese. A popular and important early work on Japanese arts.

Hardcover. 5”x7.5”, 216 pages, frontispiece and 30 plates; publisher’s
blue cloth with impressed design; inner hinge cracked and wobbly; spine
head and base frayed; covers a bit rubbed.  [09451]  $85.00

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