Hungry for trade but suspicious of proselytizers, the Tokugawa government set up an agency in Nagasaki during the seventeenth century to inspect all foreign goods entering Japan. The slightest whiff of Christianity could elicit a draconian backlash; a guidebook to Beijing including the grave of the Jesuit Mateo Ricci, for example, resulted in the confiscation of the entire cargo of the ship that brought the offending item.

The officials of the bureau in charge of inspecting foreign paintings (the Kara-e mekiki, ‘Official Appraisers of Foreign Paintings’) were charged with recording and copying imported works. Four families, the Watanabe, the Hirowatari, the Ishizaki, and the Araki, kept the office going all the way up to 1870. Through the agency of these bureaucrats, foreign subjects, compositions, and techniques spread first to local Nagasaki painters and then diffused throughout Japan.

The four framed paintings of canal scenes offered here (lots 32 and 33) were probably produced in Nagasaki during the eighteenth century. In palette, composition, and mood they strongly resemble Japanese copies of Dutch works by Araki Jogen (c.1773-1824) or Sakaki Yûrin (d.1812?) (see Cal French, Through Closed Doors: Western Influence on Japanese Art 1639-1853 (Kobe City Museum of Nanban Art and Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Rochester, Michigan, 1978), no. 32 and 33). Everything about them would have appeared exotic to a Japanese audience, starting with the framed format. (Japanese developed special rules for viewing framed pictures.) The graded blue wash at the top of lot 33 paintings suggests they may have been copied from engravings. The lowered horizon, pronounced sense of recession, the three-dimensional modelling of the figures, their peculiar poses, and the aggressive shading all spoke of a distant and unknown world. The artist seems to have been particularly fascinated by the buildings, which show considerable artistic license. The grisaille statues adorning the top of the right-hand building in one of lot 33 paintings, for example, presumably were intended to indicate classical marble sculptures in the original, but here they take the form of Dutchmen, leaning on their trademark swagger-sticks. The artist’s inventiveness also shines forth in the creative shading on the sides of the bridges, which produce a trompe l’oeil effect reminiscent of the graphics of M.C. Escher. These pictures offer a charming glimpse of the lens through which Japanese painters viewed European art.