Magazine

Japanese Collections

The sharp-eyed visitor to Czech castles and chateaus will certainly have noticed that here and there in these buildings there will objects of Japanese provenance on display. Since the end of the seventeenth century it has been very fashionable for members of the nobility - if they could afford it - to own an object, if not an entire room, of Oriental provenance and of course Japan is a part of the Orient. And so at chateaus in places such as Mělník, Český Krumlov, Veltrusy, Nelahozeves, Libochovice, Lednice and even in the Sternberg Palace at Prague Castle, it is possible to find not only Japanese porcelain and lacquerware but even entire rooms decorated in Chinese or Japanese styles.

It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that museums began to be established and collect objects of artistic or ethnographic significance. Among the primary contributors to these collections were travelers, artists, writers and admirers of Japanese art. The most prominent members of this groups of contributors included Josef Kořenský, director of a Prague secondary school and traveler, Joe Hloucha, a writer and Japonophile - his collection of woodcut prints is divided between the Náprstek and National museums, Karel Jan Hora, a businessman working in Japan, Julius Zeyer whose was first inspired by Japanese literature with the story of Gompachi and Komurasaki, Sigismund Bouška, who in 1913 organized large expositions of woodblock prints in Prague and Brno, Emil Orlík, who studied woodblock prints. This group includes many others who collected many objects in Japan, many of which were everyday objects that document a way of life no longer found in Japan.

Vojtěch Náprstek (1826-1894) was one of the first people in the Czech lands to establish an ethnographic collection - even though this was not entirely by his own choice. Náprstek returned from a visit to the United States with a great enthusiasm for technological inventions and in 1862 established the Museum of Industry in Prague, goal of which was to improve the level of industrial technology in the Czech lands. Vojtěch Náprstek was also a patron and friend to many travelers, who upon returning from their travels gave him objects of artistic or ethnographic interest. So eventually his Museum of Industry was transformed into a museum of non-European cultures, which today has in its collections about 100,000 objects, 20,000 of which are Japanese in provenance (7000 woodblock prints and paintings, 1600 pieces of pottery and porcelain, 400 items of lacquerware, more than 500 tsuba (sword hand guards) and 150 swords). His ethnographic collections from North America, Australia and Oceania are still on display in the historical Prague building that Náprstek had built for his museum next to the Baroque "U Halanků" building, where his family ran a brewery and small distillery. The Japanese collections, however, are located in the chateau of Liběchov north of Prague, which was heavily damaged by flooding in 2002, and requires major reconstruction before they can once again be placed on display.

The second largest collection of Japanese items - primarily graphics - in the Czech Republic is the Asian Collection of the National Gallery. This collection contains a total of 5500 items that were transferred to the Asian Division of the National Gallery from a variety of institutions. The Asian Collections division was established in the 1950s making it a relatively new institution, even though the National Gallery as such is a much more venerable institution, the oldest in fact. The National Gallery was established in 1796 as a picture gallery and has functioned continuously since. Its institutional status was confirmed in 1949 and its extensive collections of sculptures and painting are located in many different buildings - the permanent Asian exposition is located in a chateau in Zbraslav district of Prague.

The Moravian Gallery dates its establishment to 1873, the then-Museum of Industry has undergone many changes and today has 700 Japanese items in its collections, mostly prints, tsuba, lacquerware and porcelain. The Gallery quite frequently lends items from its collections for thematic expositions because except for the relatively large number of tsuba, the collection is not that large.

The Museum of Northern Bohemia is not only remarkable for the fact that it was established in 1873 but also for the fact that the objects from Japan in its collections were purchased at the fifth World Exposition in Vienna in 1873. The museum was also remarkable for the many enlightened curators who worked there and for the many generous donors - including such people as Baron Heinrich Liebig - that were able to donate as a result of the growth of the textile industry in the Liberec region. Today, the museum only has 154 items in its collections because it was forced to give a large part of its collection to the Asian Division of the National Gallery when it was established in the 1950s.

The Museum of Plzeň was established as an industrial museum in 1878 and today has 1500 items from the Orient in its collections, about 400 of which are Japanese, purchased in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. Prints are the most numerous items, 320 in total. This collection also contains several beautiful lacquered items (a gold lacquered mirror stand, a tebako or cosmetic box and a zushi or small shrine), porcelain and ceramics, bamboo objects and wickerware.

Other Japanese collections, though small in size, are in the possession of the Museum of Czech Literature located in the Strahov Monastery in Prague - along with the personal collections of Czech literati (Sigismund Boška, Emanuel of Lešehrad and Jiří Karásek of Lvovice) the museum acquired their collections of Japanese woodblock prints. The Náchod City Archives are the repository for materials concerning the architect Jan Letzel, the Municipal Museum in Moravské Krumlov has a collection of Japanese lacquerware and it would be possible to name many more such small collections.

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