Artist's Manuals. A Collection of 18 Titles in 44 Volumes

1881. JAPANESE ART. Artist's Manuals. A collection of 18 titles in 44 volumes. Various sizes, publisher's wrappers. Japan: Various publishers, 1881-1915. A remarkable collection of early Japanese manuals used for the instruction of painting, including some of the earliest examples of the genre. In the 1850s the Japanese government had established a school to study Western art and culture, and presumably these manuals are an outgrowth of that. Two of the volumes of Mohitsu shu gacho have some of the plates coloured in by hand, and the set of Koto shugaku mohitsa tehon joseiyo is in very poor condition. Otherwise, the collection is in a remarkable state of preservation. These little instructional booklets would seem to have not survived, with only two of the titles being listed on OCLC. Shogaku nihonga soho, copies of which are at Penn State and Princeton and Mohitsuga tehon, copies of which are at UCLA, LC, Field Museum, Harvard and Cleveland Public. A complete list of the collection is available upon request.