Potential Benefits of the Site – in General

The site can provide useful information to ukiyo-e collectors. While Frank Lloyd Wright was correct in stating that collectors don't choose prints, prints choose collectors,[1]  most thoughtful collectors realize they are merely relatively (in historical terms) short-term custodians of their prints and those prints will, with luck, be treasured by other collectors some time in the future. It is then a short step to having an interest in those collectors who were custodians of these prints before us.  As James Michener once wrote:

Like most collectors, I find much pleasure in identifying prints once owned by illustrious predecessors. For example, the notable Japanese pioneers Wakai and Hayashi once held many of [the prints reproduced in the book] and their seals are seen; Kobayashi, Kuni and Mihara are also represented. Most of the distinguished French connoisseurs, who in Europe launched both the love of ukiyo-e and its scholarship are here: Gonse, Manzi, Haviland, Jacquin, Bing, Rouart, Vignier and Koechlin. The finest German of them all, Straus-Negbaur, is represented . . .

Michener, Japanese Prints: From the Early Masters to the Modern (1959), p. 23.

So, in the best of cases, this site may be able to help a collector (or dealer or auction house specialist) determine whether a particular print has been sold previously at auction, as well as where and when (and in some cases, from whom and to whom). Of course, many prints are sold privately from one collector to another collector, from a collector to a dealer, from one dealer to another dealer, or from a dealer to a collector, and never (or only rarely) enter the public auction record. Therefore, this site is at best an imperfect reflection of the ukiyo-e print market, particularly as it relates to very rare and often very expensive prints.

In addition, there is no doubt that knowing that a print was part of a famous collection can, all things being equal, lead to some increased level of financial value for a print. In a hypothetical case of two otherwise identical prints, one with no known provenance, the other with a Henri Vever seal, the latter will, ceteris paribus, ordinarily be worth significantly more than the former. So there are at least two reasons why collectors might want to determine the provenance of their prints, for the reason given by James Michener as well as for purely economic motives.

Except in limited cases, most dealers or auction houses do not provide (in some cases, are not able to provide) much useful information about the ukiyo-e prints they sell. This is at least in part a function that dealers and auction houses have comparatively little time and limited means to do the level of research that might permit them to track down the provenance of a given print. Being a dealer in ukiyo-e is a largely gentlemanly (and gentlewomanly) but cut-throat profession and time is of the essence. Turnover of inventory is important in this business as it is in any other business.

In times past, there were ukiyo-e specialists with extraordinary levels of expertise. Some of these specialists (such as Charles Vignier, Hogitaro Inada, les Portiers, Teruji Yoshida, Kiyoshi Shibui, Jack Hillier, Roger Keyes, Richard Lane, and others) possessed seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese prints. This expertise seems in much shorter supply today. A recent auction house specialist did not realize that a print of a young girl in white attire walking near water next to a brushwood fence was a “Sagi Musume” print (and in consequence, the “young girl” was, in fact, intended to represent the celebrated Kabuki actor Segawa Kikunojo II and the print could be reasonably dated to 1770, the date when the actor revived his previous Sagi Musume performance (to great acclaim)).

For dealers or auction houses, it may also be that there is relatively limited benefit in identifying the provenance of a print unless, e.g., a print has a recognizable collector's seal (or it is a print that the dealer or auction house has previously sold).  We suppose a dealer or auction house could hypothetically open itself up to a complaint from a purchaser if it described a print as having a certain provenance unless it could be shown to be the case with a reasonably high degree of certainty.  Even when a print has a clearly (and easily) identifiable collector’s seal, however, we have seen auction records where the auction catalogue simply notes the existence of an unidentified collector’s seal. (For those interested, a list of collector's seals was compiled by Matthi Forrer and published in a 1983 issue of Andon, the Leiden-based publication of the Dutch Society for Japanese Art. This list can be accessed on line by subscribing to Andon at https://www.societyforjapaneseart.org/join-us. We understand that Andreas Marks, the curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, is compiling a more comprehensive list of collector's seals which we await eagerly.)

Finally, we must note that it is sometimes the case that prints are sold at auction or to a dealer by a party who is not interested in sharing his or her knowledge of a print’s prior provenance. It is further frequently the case that the print is sold by a person (typically an heir) who does not know what the original collector knew (where, when, and from whom the collector acquired a given print or what the collector might have known about the print). A recent example of a very early Shunsho triptych (actually originally part of a polyptych) of Kabuki actors as otokodate was sold at auction without any apparent realization on the part of the sellers (heirs) or auction house that these were prints previously sold at the famous 1925 Arthur Davison Ficke auction. So in the nature of things, many prints become unintentionally detached from their historical provenance. Thus, the primary purpose of the site is to make it possible to reunite prints with their historical provenance.