Page 481 - The Secret Museum

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, Boston (MFA), stores more than 50,000 wood-block

prints made in Japan in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
greatest treasure of the collection is a group of 6,600 prints that are never hung on the
walls of the museum. They were collected in the 1910s by two brothers, William and
Henry Spaulding. The Spaulding brothers donated the prints to the MFA in 1921 on
one condition: that they would not exhibit them, to protect the delicate colours from
fading. So, for over 90 years they have been kept in the dark, in cupboards, in

numbered portfolios, just as the Spaulding duo donated them.
I went to see the prints after hours at the museum. Everyone had gone home except

for Sarah Thompson, assistant curator of Japanese art at the museum. Sarah explained
that when the prints were created they were as cheap as a bowl of noodles. Most
people in the city of Edo, now called Tokyo, had a couple pinned up at home. They
would be ripped down and thrown away if they got tatty or a new, fashionable print
took their place. Hundreds of copies of each print were made, if not thousands.

Japan had been closed to the world until the 1860s, when the country modernized
and began trading with the west. When Japan opened her harbours, European ships
flooded in and prints like these ones in the MFA found their way across to the west.

At the time, they were virtually worthless in Japan, but to western eyes, they were
mind-blowing.

Sarah pulled swathes of images out of their drawers for me to see. You’d need
months to study everything, but I got a good feel for the collection, which represents
the best work of about 120 artists from the school of g art called ukiyo-e or
‘pictures of the floating world’. Ukiyo was originally a Buddhist concept which

suggested the sadness (uki) of life (yo). But during the peace and prosperity of the
seventeenth century uki came to mean ‘to float’ and instead of connoting sadness,
ukiyo became associated with the momentary, worldy pleasures of Japan’s rising
middle class and metropolitan Edo (Tokyo). The most popular prints were ones of
life in the pleasurable places of Edo – scenes showing Kabuki theatre, courtesans

and geisha. Later, the artists moved on to create landscapes, birds, flowers,
pilgrimages and legendary heroes. No matter what the subject, the artist always used
graceful lines and bright colours to depict reality in the fashionable ‘floating world’
style.

I immediately recognized the most famous Japanese woodblock print in the
western world – Under the Wave, off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave

, by Hokusai, (1760–1849). The print shows
ferocious, towering waves with foaming white heads about to engulf two stricken
fishing boats. The now iconic image is everywhere, and many museums and
collectors own impressions of it. However because the Spaulding print has not been
displayed, the cold blue of the water, the grey and white sky and the pale yellow
boats are just as they were in Japan in 1830 – it’s as though the print were created
this morning.