ARCHIVED Courts & Culture: The British Royal Family and the Japan Society, 1902–1923 - with Rachel Peat

Date
Wednesday 11 May 2022
Time
6.45pm

Venue
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way (Hall entrance on Barter St)
London WC1A 2TH

Venue Map (PDF)

Booking Details
Free- Booking essential

Please note this is an in-person event subject to Covid regulations and the health and safety requirements at the venue. More details will be provided to attendees closer to the date.

The activities of the Japan Society are made possible thanks to the support of its members. This event is free of charge and open to all. We realise that this is a difficult time for many people. However, if you are planning to attend and do not have a membership subscription as an individual or through your employer, please consider making a donation. You can find details of membership and how to join the Japan Society community here.

The royal and imperial families of Britain and Japan enjoyed a uniquely close relationship in the early twentieth century. An Anglo-Japanese Alliance signed in 1902 gave exchanges between the two Courts increased symbolic significance. Honours and insignia were exchanged, and reciprocal visits made by the heirs to each throne. In these decades, the nations frequently spoke of themselves as two ‘Island Empires’ of East and West.

The British Royal Family loaned an array of Japanese works of art to exhibitions and displays organised by the Japan Society in this period. Among them was a dagger with fittings designed by the Emperor Meiji, and a samurai armour presented to Queen Victoria in 1860, part of the first diplomatic gift between Japan and Britain in almost 250 years. These important loans formed part of a vibrant period of Japanese-British cultural exchange.

This lecture will explore this interaction, placing it within the long history of the British Royal Family’s courtly and diplomatic engagement with Japan. Richly illustrated by works from the Royal Collection, and accompanied by exhibition catalogues, newspaper articles and diaries from the Royal Archives, it will shed new light on Anglo-Japanese relations in the early twentieth century

Rachel Peat is Assistant Curator of Non-European Works of Art at Royal Collection Trust. Her role encompasses over 13,000 works of art from across the globe, which today furnish 13 current and historic royal residences. She is editor of Japan: Courts and Culture (published May 2020), the first publication dedicated to Japanese material in the Royal Collection, and curator of the exhibition of the same name at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, which opens on 8 April 2022. She is a contributing author to George IV: Art & Spectacle (2019) and a member of the Museum Ethnographers’ Group and Royal Studies Network.

The Royal Collection is one of the largest and most important art collections in the world, and one of the last great European royal collections to remain intact. Comprising almost all aspects of the fine and decorative arts and running to more than a million objects, the Collection is a unique and valuable record of the personal tastes of kings and queens over the past 500 years. The Royal Collection is held in trust by The Queen as Sovereign for her successors and the nation.  It is not owned by her as a private individual.

The exhibition Japan: Courts and Culture opens at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace on Friday 8 April 2022.

If you have any questions, please call the Japan Society office on 020 3075 1996 or email events@japansociety.org.uk.

* Images: Left -Group photograph taken on the occasion of Edward, Prince of Wales’s visit to Japan, 16 April 1922 |RCIN 2000493 | Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022; Right -Dagger (tantō), c.1500 (blade, Kanehisa); 1868–71 (mounts, Chikanori II) | RCIN 62631 | Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022.

Booking Info