🌸In-Gallery Talk with the Curator (Updated: April 10)🌸
Date 1: April 16 (Tue)
Date 2: April 24 (Wed)
Starts at 2:00 pm on both dates.
Please meet us at the Exhibition Room, Center for Scholarly Information, 2nd floor.
No registration needed. Anyone is welcome to join.
*The talk will be conducted in Japanese.
The draft paintings for the spring section of “Courtiers Hawking in Spring and Winter” / Click to see the IIIF high-resolution image.
Greetings
Courtier in a hat decorated with sakura (from the draft paintings)
We are pleased to welcome you to Waseda University Library’s special exhibition “Sumiyoshi Hiroyuki’s Folding Screen ‘Courtiers Hawking in Spring and Winter’: Draft Paintings Bring Gift to the Chosŏn Royal Court Back to Life.” The folding screen in question was commissioned by the Tokugawa shogunate to be presented to the twelfth embassy from the Chosŏn court in 1811. The artist, Sumiyoshi Hiroyuki (1755-1811), was an official painter to the shogunate. The Library’s collection includes the draft paintings for the spring section of the folding screen. Unfortunately, however, the completed work as well as the draft paintings for the winter section have been lost.
In October 2017, cultural exchanges between Japan and Korea became the focus of attention when documents concerning the embassies of the Chosŏn royal court to Japan were listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Nonetheless, most of the 200 some folding screens presented to the Chosŏn court over the course of twelve diplomatic missions between 1607 and 1811, as well as the draft paintings upon which they were presumably based, have been lost. The surviving draft paintings exhibited here are thus important to understanding the ideas behind these gifts.
Digitally colored draft painting based on the information gleaned from the high-resolution images and from contemporary sources
The paintings are large, even for folding screens, and since they are difficult to examine in detail, we had them photographed with a high image resolution scanner. The resulting images enabled us to read detailed annotations specifying color, materials, changes and so on and thus envisage what the finished paintings might have looked like. We also consulted Sumiyoshi Hiroyuki’s record of the creation of the now lost winter paintings, Go-byōbu no ki (Record of a folding screen), in the collection of the Archives and Mausolea Department of the Imperial Household Agency.
In this exhibition timed to coincide with spring, we display all the draft paintings for spring alongside our attempted recreations of the finished versions, based on information gleaned from the high-resolution images and from contemporary sources.
Waseda University Library
Dates & Venue
Click to see the flyer including the back side (in Japanese)
Dates: March 22 (Fri) – April 30 (Tue), 2024 *Closed on Sundays
Hours: 10:00～18:00
Venue: Exhibition Room, Center for Scholarly Information, 2nd floor
- Admission Free. Visitors without a library card can enter, too.
- Closes at 17:00 on Mar. 23 (Sat), Mar. 30 (Sat), and Apr. 6 (Sat)
Shooting by Sabia inc.
The List of Library Materials on Exhibition
The List of Library Materials on Exhibition 2024 Spring (in Japanese)
