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JAPAN SOCIETY LECTURE 20th September 2005 - Oriental Club, London Lecture by Elizabeth Horner THE INFLUENCE OF JAPANESE ART ON THE WORK OF FRANK BRANGWYN As one critic notably stated: 'Brangwyn is Brangwyn', his art is 'Brangwynesque' and there is no other artist 'so completely himself as Brangwyn'. He was not an academic artist or a follower of one particular school, but the more one looks at his work, in all disciplines - from small bookplates to large decorative easel works and huge murals; from designs for light switches to complete interiors - one begins to discern an underlying unity, a deep pervading influence which became so much a part of the artist's natural vocabulary that it is not immediately obvious. This influence was Japanese art. In 1897 a critic wrote that Brangwyn had 'no mean knowledge of Japanese art, with which he is keenly sympathetic - witness the charming collection of Japanese prints, and of old Japanese ware with which odd corners of his studio are garnished'. A photograph of Brangwyn in his Stratford Road studio, dated 1891-96, shows the artist posing against a large Japanese cabinet. Temple Lodge, Hammersmith, his home from 1900 to mid 1930s contained many 'Oriental' items of furniture. Brangwyn also collected Japanese ceramics and by 1932 the collection was considered one of the most important in the country. His library contained many books relating to Chinese and Japanese art including the first six copies of Artistic Japan and books by Hayashi and the Goncourt brothers. As far as we know, Brangwyn had no formal academic or art training and he was not an intellectual - so one may question where he learnt about Japanese art and who first instructed him? It is only conjecture, but it is entirely possible that Thomas Joseph Larkin was largely responsible for fostering Brangwyn's interest in Oriental arts and crafts. Larkin was a member of the Japanese Fine Art Association founded in Japan in 1880 and established in London in 1881, with the aim of supplying a fine collection of Japanese art work to the cognoscenti. The Japanese Gallery was originally situated on the 1st floor, 14 Grafton Street, London moving to 7 King Street, St James after three years, and then to 28 New Bond Street in 1888. In March 1888 Larkin mounted an exhibition of 'Japanese paintings, drawings etc by the leading artists of Japan from the 9th to the 19th century', and in the summer showed 'a collection of specially selected items of lacquer, ivory and wood carving, bronze and inlaid metal work, pottery, porcelain and cloisonné, paintings and drawings, embroideries and miscellaneous art objects'. His interest in Japanese art was obviously wide-ranging. He was also knowledgeable - he wrote the forewords to the accompanying catalogues - and his approach academic - he consulted the catalogue of Japanese and Chinese paintings in the British Museum, compiled by Dr William Anderson FRCS, the first Chairman of the Japan Society Council. In 1892 Larkin was enrolled as a member of the Japan Society. Larkin was not only interested in Japanese art, but also in the career of the young Frank Brangwyn. In late 1890 or early 1891, when Brangwyn was 23 years old, he and his friend William Hunt were financed by Larkin to visit South Africa, the resulting paintings being exhibited in the Japanese Gallery the following year. Brangwyn's works from this period combine impressionism with small areas of fine detail, and provide an early example of the influence of Japanese art. For example, the scrub in the foreground of Fieldworkers (1891) was probably painted with a brush in which all the hairs were separated, creating a 'dragged' effect - a Japanese method which Larkin may have introduced to the artist. We do know that in December 1892 Larkin proposed Brangwyn for membership of the Japan Society. This would have provided Brangwyn with free access to the Society's Library at 20 Hanover Square, the opportunity to attend art related lectures and expand his knowledge of Japanese art, and to meet Japanese people and connoisseurs of Oriental art. Membership of the Society may well have played an important part in Brangwyn's education and career. Interestingly a number of members of the Japan Society were men who were to prove highly influential in promoting Brangwyn's artistic advancement. For example the Editor of The Studio magazine, Charles Holme (enrolled 1892, Honorary Secretary 1894) commissioned the young artist to write articles for the first two issues of the magazine in 1893 and subsequent volumes documented Brangwyn's progress in fine and decorative arts. Brangwyn also gained an international following through the sister publications in Europe and International Studio, later Creative Art, in America. Alfred East (enrolled 1891, Council Member 1894) who travelled to Japan in the company of Charles Holme and Emma and Arthur Lasenby Liberty (enrolled 1891, Council Member 1894) in 1888, was another champion of Brangwyn's work. The two artists went sketching in Spain in 1896 and in Cornwall in 1904 when they stayed in East's house in St Ives. The older artist purchased some of Brangwyn's important early works, including Shrine at the Well (1895), Arab Musicians (1895-96) and Cider Press (1902); proposed Brangwyn for membership of the Royal Academy in 1904 and, together with his fellow committee members, George Frampton and Walter Crane (member), commissioned Brangwyn to design the British exhibition rooms for the 1905 Venice Biennale. The publisher John Lane (enrolled 1892) worked closely with Brangwyn in producing books either about the artist or illustrated by him, including Walter Shaw Sparrow's Prints and Drawings by Frank Brangwyn (1919), Herbert Furst's The Decorative Art of Frank Brangwyn (1924), Edward Hutton's The Pageant of Venice (1922) and Hayter Preston's Windmills (1923). Shosaku Matsukata, a son of Count Masayoshi Matsukata, a Japanese Prime Minister, became a member of the Japan Society in 1899, when he was based in London as 2nd Secretary to the Imperial Japanese Legation at 4 Grosvenor Gardens. Shosaku is believed to have been a regular visitor to Brangwyn's house, Temple Lodge, Hammersmith, where the two would discuss Japanese art and ceramics. In 1901 Shosaku moved to Brussels as 1st Secretary before returning to Tokyo in 1903 where he worked for the Imperial Foreign Office. In May 1902 his parents, Count and Countess Masayoshi Matsukata visited London and attended the Society's 11th annual dinner at the Metropole Hotel - it is unlikely however that Brangwyn attended since he was socially inept. However it was probably at Shosaku's suggestion that his brother Kojiro visit Brangwyn in London in about 1917, a move that was to prove of huge benefit to both (of which more later). Brangwyn also knew Sadajiro (Rokusburo) Yamanaka, a connoisseur and dealer in Japanese and Chinese art, who was elected a member in 1900, when his address is given as 68 New Bond Street. By 1913 the Yamanaka Gallery had moved to 127 New Bond Street and the Society also records an address in Kitahama, Osaka. Brangwyn is thought to have purchased Japanese ceramics from Yamanaka and c1931 produced a large etched portrait of the dealer showing him reading a book with possible symbolic additions of a vase with tulips, 2 statuettes, trailing clematis and 3 masks. The Society played a major role in the Japan-British Exhibition held at Shepherd's Bush, London in 1910, Brangwyn becoming a member of the General Fine Art Committee. Yoshijiro Urushibara demonstrated wood-block printing at the Exhibition and became a close friend of Brangwyn's. Urushibara collaborated with a number of artists to make woodblocks from their drawings and watercolours, the most successful of these artistic enterprises probably being with Brangwyn. In 1919 they worked together on woodcuts to illustrate a book of Laurence Binyon's poems, entitled Bruges, Urushibara's 'interpretations being declared 'remarkable, for his woodcuts are scrupulously faithful, and yet unmistakably Japanese'. In 1924 Urushibara produced woodcuts taken from Brangwyn's drawings, published as Ten Woodcuts by Yoshijiro Urushibara, and in 1940 Leaves from the Sketch Books of Frank Brangwyn was published, Urushibara's interpretations of Brangwyn's sketches being, as Laurence Binyon pointed out in his foreword, rather in the manner of Hokusai's Manga. These men all played a significant part in Brangwyn's life, but of even greater importance was Siegfried Bing, who became a member of the Japan Society in 1892. Brangwyn's first known commission for the German dealer, in 1893, was to design a tapestry, Le Roi au Chantier, for the artist Albert Besnard. In 1895 Brangwyn designed murals and stencil decorations for the exterior of Bing's Galerie L'Art Nouveau in Paris and at least two large decorative panels for the entrance hall. Although Brangwyn had associated with A H Mackmurdo and William Morris, both men involved with the decorative arts, he remained an easel painter. It appears to have been Bing who detected Brangwyn's latent talents and persuaded him to venture into mural decoration and the design of carpets, rugs, tapestries, stained glass panels, jewellery and posters. In 2004 Evelyne Posseme observed that 'among British artists, it was undoubtedly Frank Brangwyn who enjoyed the closest co-operation with Siegfried Bing'. Whatever lessons Brangwyn had already learnt about Japanese arts and crafts would have been consolidated by association with Bing and his stable of artists, including the Nabis. There are various stages of cross-cultural design. The most obvious is plagiarism, where foreign images are used consciously for exotic flavour, with little understanding of the symbolism - for example Whistler's Victorian genre paintings with added Japanese accessories - The Lange Liezen of the Six Marks (1864). A more advanced stage involves working in the style of a school or another artist, re-creating rather than reproducing. In the final stage, the influence has been thoroughly assimilated and is sub-conscious - for example Whistler's portrait of Carlyle (1872-73). Most of Brangwyn's works are in this final category. The underlying pictorial values of Japanese art and the individual stylistic devices and elements became the core of Brangwyn's aesthetic, not only in fine art but also in the decorative arts and interior design. Certain Japanese motifs were assimilated into Brangwyn's fine and graphic art, either consciously or sub-consciously, for example trellis, grilles, silhouettes, asymmetry, using posts as spatial dividers, the use of truncated objects in the foreground to create depth, elimination of middle distance reducing the foreground and background to the same plane, and strong geometrical compositions. For example, the emphasis in ukiyo-e was always on 'the meticulous arrangement of lines and forms across a flat surface' and probably the earliest indication of Brangwyn's adherence to Japanese design, was in the asymmetrical compositions he adopted, frequently involving strong diagonals. The geometry of these works became almost formulaic, countless paintings containing a diagonal in the foreground and a high horizon (again a Japanese borrowing), for example On the Quayside (1890). A bold variation on the theme is displayed in St Ives (1889) where a wall effectively slices the painting in two vertically, whilst giving a strong perspective and exceptional dynamic. Brangwyn also used trees as a compositional device. The shoji and fusama of Japanese houses form a rectangular or square trellis, which came to pervade much of their design. In landscapes the veil like effect was translated into walls of bamboo and tree trunks, the emphasis being on the festigiate nature of the trees rather than the foliage and spreading branches. The resulting verticals can also be viewed as an example of the Japanese method of using posts as spatial dividers, which create depth, asymmetry, separate and combine, or fragment the vision. The two large, decorative oil panels, Dancing and Music, which Brangwyn painted for the Galerie L'Art Nouveau entrance hall used these characteristic vertical tree trunks. The works have an innocence and gaiety which is lost in the artist's later work, Dancing (1895) portraying topless, laughing girls performing for a Pan type figure lower left. Brangwyn also employed trees to great effect in the mosaic mural for St Aidan's church, Leeds (1908-16), where groups of timber mark the divisions of the narrative without destroying the continuity, the densest thickets, almost columnar in appearance defining the central panel, thereby adding significance to the depiction of St Aidan preaching. One of Brangwyn's most delicate and beautiful works, Beguinage, Bruges (1912) shows the nuns' houses seen through a rhythmical screen of trees, a painting which obviously appealed to Urushibara, who produced his own interpretation in 1919. The ability of Japanese artists to encapsulate varied daily activities in confined formats, for example in the vertical strip calendars and hashira-e (pillar-pictures), was employed by Brangwyn in the frieze he devised for the exterior of Bing's Galerie L'Art Nouveau. Here, in a horizontal strip some 5.5m long, the artist placed Middle Eastern potters. The squatting figures were strong and boldly drawn, and outlined clearly in blue, a technique probably borrowed from the heavy lines used by ukiyo-e artists to describe the swing and padded weight of kimono hems. This dark outline, termed cloisonniste (from cloisonné work) had, of course, already been employed to great effect by Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley and Gauguin. It became a defining feature of Brangwyn's murals, can also be seen in some of his oil paintings, indicated the leading in his stained glass, and was used in some early commercial work, notably the poster designed for the Bing/Tiffany exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries, London in 1899. The poster layout is similar to contemporary works produced in Vienna, for example Klimt's poster for the first Secession Exhibition (1898), and is notable for the successful combination of word and image. The Japanese habit of blending illustration and calligraphy, whether a poem or advertisement for tea shops, was taken up by western artists who learnt to integrate design and lettering in a way only seen previously in William Blake's books and medieval manuscripts. In Europe the concept was popularized by poster artists but its adoption in England was limited, designers preferring to produce a drawing and leave the script to the typesetter or printer. Brangwyn was one of the few British artists to fuse image and lettering in commercial work. The poster depicts a youth, drawn in Brangwyn's masculine version of Art Nouveau, with, above, a horizontal panel depicting an industrial scene of smoking chimneys. Brangwyn was far more at ease drawing male figures, and when called upon to depict gentle feminine types, developed androgynous creatures with short hair, boyish faces, muscular shoulders and hairy legs - his own distinctive version of ukiyo-e women. Similar characters appeared in Brangwyn's design for The Studio poster in the same year, murals for Edmund Davis's bedroom in 1900 and Robert Hawthorne Kitson's dining room murals in Taormina, Sicily, in 1910. The figures are stiff and uncomfortable, almost sterile and certainly lack the eroticism, hedonism, and pre-occupation with female beauty rendered by the Japanese artists. For whatever reason, women are generally notable for their absence in Brangwyn's work and when they do appear are blessed with larger, rounded bodies, in the style of Kitagawa Utamaro or Rubens, but lacking any sensuality or individuality, being subsumed into the decorative design. A rare example of alluring females is in the painting Slave Market (1920-21). In Line and Form, Crane noted that 'the Japanese are equally deliberate decorators. Their wooden block colour prints, kakemonos (ukiyo-e) are quite definite pattern paintings, in which the pattern motif is as strong as, or stronger than, the graphic or figurative motif'. This device was borrowed by the Secessionists, who represented objects by dissolving them into ornamented patterns, for example Klimt's The Kiss (1908). Similarly, Brangwyn's Slave Market is an abstract decoration of pixilated fragments of colour. The glorious patterned clothing may have been influenced by the sumptuous silk and brocade fabrics and kimonos which Brangwyn would have seen in Paris. Other examples can be found in the St Aidan's mosaics, the murals at Christ's Hospital, Horsham (1912-23) and one of Brangwyn's Earth panels for the Panama-Pacific Exposition (1914), where Arthur Finch noted that, "the brush tintings on the dress of the mother … are Japanesque in their delicate hues of purple, brown, pink, and white spottings." The shallow space of Slave Market is another borrowing from Japan. The Japanese word for perspective combines the definitions "near" and "far" and artists used isometric projections rather than the traditional western perspective. By these means middle distance is eliminated which therefore reduces the foreground and background to the same plane. Brangwyn frequently adopted this technique, for example in the etching Meat Market, Bruges (1906), which used as inspiration a photograph. The original image lacks the loitering crowds in the foreground and the architectural detail of the background building, but shows the originality of the artist in the way the covered market stalls form a strong horizontal against the background of Flemish houses. Reducing works to a single plane often resulted in an airlessness and a feeling of claustrophobia which was heightened in Brangwyn's "Oriental" works by the use of bold, vibrant colours taken from ukiyo-e prints. It was Monet who, in 1878, noted that, "we needed the arrival of Japanese albums in our midst, before anyone dared to sit down on a river bank, and juxtapose on canvas a roof which was red, a wall which was white, a green poplar, a yellow road and blue water. Before the example given by the Japanese, this was impossible, the painter always lied…all one ever saw on a canvas were subdued colours, drowning in a half-tone." Not shackled by tradition, Brangwyn responded wholeheartedly to this freedom to paint the colors he thought he saw rather than those dictated by convention, and Kandinsky noted that the artist was one of the first to employ the, "daring and primitive colour combination," of blue-red, perfectly displayed in Brangwyn's Buccaneers (1892). When this oil was shown at the 1893 Salon, Parisians apparently hailed it, "as a revelation. Fashions sprang up in Brangwyn reds, and people flocked to see his buccaneers, till the carpet on the floor of the gallery was worn out all around that one painting." Writing in 1905, Leonce Benedite could still vividly recall the painting, not only the colors but also the feelings it generated: A ship upon a sea of intense blue, with sails unfurled of a magnificent red, such a red as had not been seen for many a long day. Shall I ever forget the extraordinary artistic emotion it called forth in some of us, and the covetous looks with which it was devoured by the young curator of the Luxembourg? Japanese dyer's stencils, kategami, were probably introduced into Europe in the 1870s. The patterns produced from these stencils were black and white, with aligned, repeated patterns, and strong dividing bars, due to the nature of the material. Designs were simple, generally naturalistic, and of a silhouette nature. The influence can be seen in the stencils of abstracted flowers and leaves which Brangwyn painted haphazardly on the exterior of Bing's shop, a device predating the works of either Mackintosh or Hoffman. Many of Brangwyn's woodcuts have a stencil or silhouette character, in particular the series of amusing single-color masks (1919) which echo the fantastic make-up and exaggerated features of Kabuki actors. The artist frequently used silhouettes to great effect, one of his most powerful commercial poster designs showing a perspective of the Forth Bridge, the bold engineering highlighted in black against a yellow-orange background. In fact the way in which Brangwyn observed bridges was also peculiarly Japanese. The latter regard bridges not merely as a convenient stepping-stone, but as an integral and organic part of a landscape, just like the tree trunks which mirrored the bridge construction. Brangwyn, an ardent pontist, dissected bridges, viewed them from below bestowing upon the structures a cathedral like grandeur, from above making them dominate the landscape, or used the arches to frame a distant scene, always seeking out the most effective and dramatic design. The introduction of single colour woodcuts into Europe had a profound impact. Not only did it lead to a revival in printmaking in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but also to the acceptance of black and white as significant colours per se, black being a favourite of Zen Buddhist artists who reduced their paintings to multitudinous shades of black, and white being understood as the universal pictorial light. Brangwyn himself was adept at producing grisaille works, largely as a result of commissions from magazines such as Scribners and Graphic. Editors often found it easier to reproduce a black and white painting than a photograph supplied by their correspondents and would therefore commission artists to paint identical monochrome versions. Brangwyn produced about 142 monochrome works as illustrations for books and magazines, including Blocking of Port Arthur (1904). This painting represented an episode during the war between Japan and Russia and appeared in The Graphic, 21 May 1904. Brangwyn's skill in rendering monochrome works was to be of benefit when he was commissioned to paint mural panels for the RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, New York (1930-34). Brangwyn was a major figure in the revival of printmaking - he was made an Associate and fellow of the Royal Society of painter-printmakers in 1903; founded the Society of Graphic Art in 1920, a group which exhibited both drawings and prints at the Royal Institute Galleries from 1921 to 1940; and was an active member of the Senefelder Club founded in 1909, succeeding Joseph Pennell as President. The Club promoted self-printing and Brangwyn was one of a small but dedicated number of artists who prepared his own stones, drew directly on the stone rather than using transfer paper, and could print his own proofs. Brangwyn also owned his own press and experimented with printing etchings. The influence of Japanese art can also be seen in Brangwyn's approach to interior design. In 1880 Thomas Cutler noted that 'a Japanese house exhibited in its simple apartments, a refinement and simplicity in marked contrast to that discordant style which is so offensive to the eye in most of our European rooms.' The appreciation of an interior as an integrated, co-ordinated whole, became, in Europe, a Gesamtkunstwerk. Brangwyn adhered to these principles in his interiors for Edmund and Mary Davis at 11-13 Lansdowne Road, Kensington (1899-1900), for Robert Kitson in 1909, for the SS Empress of Britain in 1930-31, and more particularly for his designs for exhibition rooms - the Venice Biennale in 1905 and 1907 and the Brangwyn Room at the Ghent International Exhibition in 1913. As a Gesamtkunstwerk, the Davis interior was a tour de force, Brangwyn designing the paneling, painted mural, the furniture, marquetry inlay, table lamp, a silver dressing table set and exquisite stamped and pierced oxidized silver light fittings and fingerplates, based on plant designs. These are reminiscent of Japanese metalwork and the fretted and chiseled designs of tsuba, sword guards. Brangwyn described traditional British exhibition areas as 'red and stuffy, over hung, crowded like the RA' . When designing the British Room for the 1905 Biennale, he explained to his friend A S Covey that: 'the scheme of colour is what I believe to be the very best for the purpose. The greater part of the walls are of a buff grey, which, as a background for the pictures, will neither take away from the subtleties of tone, nor force into prominence any particularly strong notes of colour occurring in the works shown'. The strikingly simple room with plain square sectioned wood furniture was in stark contrast to the grey-green velvet and gold of the Piedmont room, the rose silk walls of the Tuscan area or the floor to ceiling gold of the Hungarian room, and deservedly won a Gold medal. In describing Japanese decorative arts, Cutler had noted that: 'we find the essential elements of beauty in design - fitness for the purpose which the object is intended to fulfil, good workmanship and constructive soundness, which give a value to the commonest article, and some touch of ornament by a skilful hand, together creating a true work of art.' These tenets formed the basis of Brangwyn's approach to furniture design. He believed in fitness of form to function and choosing the most suitable material for each article, he disliked unnecessary moulding, insisted on excellent craftsmanship, and delighted in marquetry designs which added a decorative quality to a work without destroying the simple lines. In the 1900s the inlay designs were derived from plant forms, by the 1930s they had become more geometrical and obviously Art Deco. In 1917 Brangwyn informed a friend that 'a Japanese Noble' was planning a collection for Japan, including, at that date, thirty Brangwyn paintings. The letter referred to the aforementioned Kojiro Matsukata, who studied at Rutgers University, New Jersey, before gaining a PhD in Civil Law from Yale University in 1890. He worked as his father's secretary and then moved into industry becoming Senior Executive of the Kawasaki Shipping Company. Herbert Furst described Matsukata as a millionaire and 'the Nippon Maecenas', referring to the philanthropic motives behind his art collection. Matsukata explained to Yashiro Yukio that: 'There are thousands of painters in Japan who are doing their best to create oil paintings and show them in exhibitions without having seen an example of the real thing. This is an unfortunate situation. I would like to collect some real European paintings and send them back to Japan so they can see them'. The collection grew to over 2,000 works. In 1918 Brangwyn reported that Matsukata owned '30 to 40 of my pictures and sketches including the great picture I was doing and not yet completed of the Outcasting of Belgium'. Brangwyn was also asked to select works for Matsukata, including paintings by Constable, Le Gros, Matthew Maris, Constantine Meunier, Charles Shannon, Turner and Whistler. The artist had contacts all over Europe who sent him details and photographs of available works, which, if admired would be shipped to the studio for a more rigorous vetting. In 1921 Brangwyn sent a cheque for £400 to Paul Lambotte, the Belgian Minister of Fine Arts, in payment for a work intended for Matsukata. Yashiro Yukio, Leonce Benedite, Director of the Musee de Luxembourg, Paris, and Tsuchida Bakusen, a Japanese painter living in Paris were also instrumental in locating paintings for Matsukata. According to Brangwyn's assistant at the time, Frank Alford, in the single month of October 1921 Matsukata was considering purchasing a Bastien Lepage from Croal Thompson for £4,000, a set of old master drawings from Kerr Lawson for £24,000, and a set of about ten tapestries and four primitives from a St John's Wood dealer for £22,000. In 1922 The New York Herald announced that the 'mysterious Japanese' who had 'been buying at extravagant prices all sorts of valuable pictures, tapestries, potteries, etc.' had arrived in the country, but the excitement was tempered somewhat when Matsukata ignored 'genuine antiques' and purchased works by 'Innes, Chase, Davies and Mary Cassatt'. Matsukata was not only a great admirer of Brangwyn's work, but also a friend and patron, and, given Brangwyn's knowledge and understanding of Japanese art, it is not surprising that he was chosen to design an art gallery to house the great collection in Japan. Brangwyn started work on the project in 1918. Art galleries available to the public are a concept of the last two hundred years; prior to that art collections were in private hands. The British Museum was opened in Montague House, Bloomsbury, in 1759 and the Louvre in Paris opened in 1792. The first purpose built public museum in Europe was at Kassel, Germany in 1769-79. In Britain the Museums Act of 1845 with amendments in 1850 and 1855, led to the setting up of art galleries in large cities, for example Liverpool, Carlisle and Manchester. Japan was not that far behind. An exhibit of foreign products organised by Hisanari Machida, following his visit to Europe in 1865, led to the foundation of the Ueno Imperial Museum (now the Tokyo National Museum). Interest in 'bijutsukan' (fine art galleries) was gradually awakened, Takahashi Yuichi produced designs for a 'spiral painting exhibition tower' in 1881, a government sponsored art exhibition (Bunten) began in 1907, the writers of the magazine Shirakaba launched an appeal for public donations towards a gallery in 1917, and Nakahara Minoru built the Kudan Gallery in 1924. Matsukata's dream eclipsed all these visions, and if built, would have become the largest museum of Western art outside Europe and the Americas. The original choice of location was Kobe but it was finally decided to build in the suburb of Azabu overlooking Tokyo City and harbour. The museum was originally to have been called the Brangwyn Museum, but, as the collection grew, the name was changed to represent something more general - Kyoraku Bijutsu Kwan. The official English translation of Kyoraku is 'Sheer Pleasure', and although the word 'raku' has a meaning similar to hedonistic, a more apt translation would probably be something like Museum of the People. Brangwyn's design was monumental and minimalist. He described the design as 'a very simple great place with a garden in the centre', and set out his theories in an article in The Times, where he stated that his gallery would 'be different from any yet built': 'Its first intention is utility. Its second is that it shall harmonize with its surroundings of native architecture and scenery without giving it a purely Japanese character. That would be unsuitable, as it is a gallery devoted to Western art and designed by a Western artist. So I made it as simple as I could. I did not want it to look like "a stranger in a strange land"'. Although Brangwyn produced the basic design and his assistant Alford helped with designing walls, doorways and fountains, the architecture and engineering were carried out by Paul Turpin's firm. De Parry, working for Turpin, produced detailed construction drawings from Brangwyn's notes and instructions and Alford's sketches, whilst specialist draughtsmen were called upon to produce professional elevations and perspectives. There are thirteen known drawings of the Museum. These are a plan, east-west section of main building and annexe, north-south section of main building, west elevation and main building corridor seen from the yard, aerial view, artist's impression of entrance, south elevation, perspective of entrance hall, perspective of gallery, cloister with fountain in centre (dated 1920), the Japanese garden between the main building and annex (signed with Brangwyn's monogram and dated 1921), a coloured front elevation, a coloured elevation of the annex gallery, and an aerial perspective of the cloister with subsidiary drawings on the same sheet. A further photograph shows a completed octagonal exhibition stand doubling as a bench. The final design, a blend of Classical and Japanese austerity, was for a single storey structure, rectangular in plan, built around a cloistered quadrangle and connected to a smaller rectangular annex by a garden. The buildings were surrounded by an extensive paved terrace on a podium above the neighbouring area. Existing tree groupings were to be retained wherever possible, although the arboreal renderings in the perspectives and elevations do not correspond, and, presumably, owe their existence to artistic licence. The buildings were to be of brick, subsequently rendered, not a traditional Japanese building material and therefore a symbol of affluence. The roofing was to be of Japanese pipe tiling with glass sections to allow natural light into the galleries. The Building News described the main building as 'simple to the point of severity, [possessing] a beauty of its own due to the restraint, good lines, and fine proportions, coupled with the imposing factor of scale'. The front elevation façade is slab-like and monolithic, without windows, the only decoration being small squares of black and white mosaic set beneath the eaves, reminiscent of the square stencil patterns placed on the exterior of Bing's art gallery. The south façade was less bleak having a covered arcade supported by pedimented columns, on either side of the entrance podium. The southern elevation provides two alternatives, a solid wall behind the arcade or tall round headed windows. The plan also suggests glazing. If this were to be the case, the arcade, set at a lower level would prevent direct sunlight entering the gallery, whilst allowing natural light. The entrance hall was a 10.9m cube. The doors on each wall, providing access to two galleries, the courtyard and the exterior, were to be surmounted by semi-circular backlit stained glass windows illustrating modern industries. The perspective, however, only shows one such design; the remaining arches being filled with plain glass, divided, like the glass doors, into squares. This gives the appearance of shoji, and a similar square motif is carried throughout the buildings. The hall and gallery walls were to be painted soft grey and teak was specified for the roofs, doorways and furniture. The plans indicate suspended timber floors. In the centre of the hall was placed a buff coloured ceramic bowl fountain with a blue rim. Small holes beneath the rim allowed water to trickle down into a square pond, reflecting the ceiling and stained glass, creating a sumptuous, glittering ensemble. Groups of sculptures by Bistolfi were to be placed in the corners of the hall. From the lavish entrance hall one entered the minimalist galleries. As with his work for the Venice Biennale and Ghent Exhibition, Brangwyn was determined that the galleries would present a plain canvas on which to exhibit works of art. A frieze was placed below the ceiling and a plinth at the base, leaving 5.1m of wall space for hanging fine art. Although the perspective does not indicate a patterned frieze, The Building News states that it was 'unpretentiously enriched by quietly coloured stencil foliations of simple patterns between the posts', probably like the stencils on the Galerie L'Art Nouveau exterior. Panels of glass were set into the tiled roofing and the gallery ceilings were fitted with interior skylights, divided by a square grid, thereby filtering natural light into the exhibition areas. There were provisions for regulating the amount of light. The quadrangle, for the display of statuary, could be accessed from the main hall and a western doorway and was surrounded by low roofed cloisters providing more space for exhibits. The annex was designed to display the decorative arts - furniture, tapestry and ceramics - and was connected to the main building by a Japanese garden. In April 1922 The Times misguidedly noted that the museum was 'now being built'. On 1 September 1923 Tokyo and the economy were both affected by the Great Kanto earthquake. Four years later the Kawasaki Shipping Company began to suffer in the general post-war recession and the 15th Bank ceased to conduct business. Matsukata returned from Geneva in an effort to save the company, but in May 1928 he resigned after thirty-two years as President. His vast collection became part of the Kawasaki assets, with more than half being sold and scattered. About 1200 items had already been shipped to Japan in 1919 and 1920 but the 100% import duty had persuaded Matsukata to leave the remainder in London and Paris. The London collection was housed in the Pantechnicon in Knightsbridge, which, on 8 October 1939 burnt down. The French collection survived the war and was recognised as French property under the terms of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951). However, although the French Government retained seventeen works, including Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles, the remainder were returned to Japan, and are now housed in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, designed by Le Corbusier and opened in 1957. Brangwyn's ability to distil the essence of Japanese art into his work is indicated by the high regard in which his oeuvre was held by Japanese artists and collectors in his own lifetime, and the country's continued fascination with Brangwyn's art in the 21st century.

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