Education and Early Career

The Japan Craze
When an American flotilla forced Japan to end several centuries of self-imposed isolation in 1854, Japanese art and culture began to filter into the Western world. After the 1876 Centennial exposition in Philadelphia, the public’s interest in Japan’s customs, art, and architecture was propelled into a bona fide mania. When Charles and Henry Greene arrived in Boston in 1888, the “Japan craze” was reaching its frenzied peak and many had started aligning traditional Japanese art and culture with the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement.

In the 1880s, the MFA already had a sizable collection of Japanese art, largely from three men: Edward S. Morse, Ernest Fenellosa, and William Sturgis Bigelow. In 1890, Fenellosa was lured to Boston to establish the Museum’s Department of Japanese Art. Soon after, he started offering scholarly lectures and organized a series of exhibitions. In the spring of 1893, when the Greenes were still in Boston, he mounted a show of paintings by the Japanese artist Hokusai, most of which he had personally collected in Japan. This painting was displayed in that exhibition, although it has subsequently been reattributed to Totoya Hokkei.

Text courtesy of Nonie Gadsden, Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston