Page 483 - The Secret Museum

and writing to his brother, Theo, about them in 1888, ‘I envy the Japanese for the

enormous clarity that pervades their work. They draw a figure with a few well-
chosen lines as if it were as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat.’

Van Gogh painted his own versions of two of the prints from Hiroshige’s 1856–58
series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo – one of delicate blossom in a plum
orchard, the other a bridge showered with splinters of spring rain, called Sudden
Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge . I saw both

of his paintings in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They are called Flowering
Plum Orchard: After Hiroshige and Bridge in the Rain: After Hiroshige. Van Gogh
was was also inspired by Japanese prints to create Almond Blossom, in 1890, a
symbol of new life, of spring, as a present for his brother Theo’s newborn son, also
called Vincent. Impressionist artists, including Manet, Degas and Monet – who

covered the walls of his house in Giverny with more than 200 Japanese woodcuts –
found the prints unusual and shocking. They were ethereal and beautiful, unlike
anything in western art. It was as though they came from another planet.

The Spaulding brothers came late to the game of collecting Japanese prints: they
bought collections from other people, including Frank Lloyd Wright, designer of the
iconic Solomon Guggenheim building in New York, but resold any they were not in
love with. They had a great eye and collected only the best, which is why their
collection is so wonderful. You can see images from the collection on the museum’s

website, as the images were photographed in 2005, but the originals will never go on
display.
Graphic arts specialists, lovers of Japan and devotees of beauty can make an

appointment to visit the collection to study the prints first hand and glimpse the
colours of Edo that inspired van Gogh and Impressionist artists, and which have
developed into modern video games, cartoons – and the Japanese creations I like
best, the delightful animated world of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation and film
studio in Tokyo. Their film Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature

in 2001, the only film that isn’t in English to have done so. I’d give an Oscar to their
2008 film Ponyo, a brilliant interpretation of The Little Mermaid, with the sweetest
Japanese theme song you’ll ever hear.