List of Principal Artists.
| * | Buncho |
| * | Choki |
| ** | Harunobu |
| ** | Hiroshige I |
| ** | Hokusai |
| * | Kiyomasu |
| * | Kiyomitsu I |
| ** | Kiyonaga |
| * | Kiyonobu I |
| * | Kiyonobu II |
| ** | Koriusai |
| * | Kwaigetsudō |
| Masanobu (Kitao) | |
| ** | Masanobu (Okumura) |
| ** | Moronobu |
| ** | Sharaku |
| * | Shigemasa |
| * | Shigenaga |
| * | Shuncho |
| Shunko (Katsukawa) | |
| Shunman | |
| ** | Shunsho |
| Shunyei | |
| Sukenobu | |
| Toshinobu | |
| Toyoharu | |
| Toyohiro | |
| * | Toyokuni I |
| * | Toyonobu (Ishikawa) |
| ** | Utamaro I |
| * | Yeishi |
Collecting is to a certain extent creative; for the picture of the art of Japanese prints that a collection presents is almost as definitely an expression of a personal interpretation as is a book on the subject. What the collectors treasure will be preserved; what they reject will doubtless perish as valueless.
One of the collector's joys is the sense that he is laying by immeasurable riches for posterity. Much remains for us still to learn from Japanese prints; and any sheet in a collection may prove to be the key that will some day unlock doors leading to treasure-chambers. Both historically and æsthetically, the field of Japanese prints still offers many undiscovered regions to the explorer. By making available the material for such investigations, the collector performs a valuable service.
The collector's own satisfaction is not dependent upon the fact of possession. To seek, to desire ardently, is not to covet; and the most eager collectors are the very ones who most thoroughly enjoy a beautiful print owned by another. Possession is an accident; but enjoyment is a form of genius.
Collecting at its best is very far from mere acquisitiveness; it may become one of the most humanistic of occupations, seeking to illustrate, by the assembling of significant reliques, the march of the human spirit in its quest of beauty, and the aspirations that were its guide. To discover, preserve, relate, and criticize these memorials is the rational aim of the collector. The joy of pursuit which he experiences is a crude but delightful one; and discovery has the triumphant sweetness of all successful effort. The act of restoring and preserving is a pious service to the future, and a delicate handicraft. To arrange examples in accurate relation to each other, and illustrate a conception of complex history by means of concrete specimens, is a constructive task that involves detailed knowledge and wide vision. And finally, the attempt to appraise the spiritual values of the parts and the whole may be an illuminating achievement, relating all this material to the general stream of cultural development and to the history of the race.
The best way to study an art of the past is to collect examples of it. The collector's historical sense is trained and his discriminative powers are sharpened by his activities. As his education progresses, his chief interest is in works of an ever higher quality. He attempts always to acquire the best, and his knowledge of what is best is always widening. His is the task of judging between degrees of perfection. It differs not so very widely from that desperate search for an ideal fulfilment which is the curse, the inspiration, and the one abiding joy of the artist.
The artist's sense of triumph in an achievement must be only momentary; if he continues long to regard his creation as admirable, he has reached the stagnation of his powers and the end of his career; he must ever hate to-day what he created yesterday, in order that he may be driven on to produce a still finer thing to-morrow. The collector, also, must eventually abandon his present position and move forward; and, tragic to confess, perhaps his ultimate triumph comes on that day when the field he long has loved ceases to suffice his growing sense of beauty, and he sends his collection under the hammer, having mastered it and passed beyond it. For every collector must in the end transcend his collection, unless he is to perish in it as in some fatal Saragossa Sea.
A collection is a life-estate only, and the important question confronts every collector as to what disposition shall be made of his possessions after his death. My personal feeling is strongly against the bequest of such a collection to a public institution. These prints are inherently suited to private exhibition and not to public display. They must be kept in portfolios, not hung up in galleries, or they fade. They must be examined closely and at leisure; the spectator should be able, seated at ease, to study them as he holds them in his hand. To walk through a gallery of prints is only a slight pleasure; to sit in the library of the collector and inspect and discuss the same prints one by one is a great delight. Further, they require a degree of care that they would not receive in the public institutions. The prints in most public collections are repaired, mounted, and handled with a carelessness that horrifies the collector. That painstaking skill in restoring, preserving, and mounting to the best advantage, which means so much for the ultimate effect of a print, is seldom, if ever, exercised except by the private owner. It may be said that if these treasures are in private hands, the public is deprived of them. This is untrue. The great body of the public would pass them by in a gallery, for this is not a spectacular or obtrusive art like sculpture. On the other hand, any person who gives evidence of a reasonable degree of interest can not only obtain free and willing access to all the private collections with which I am familiar, but he may have at his disposal the services of the owner of the collection to explain, interpret, and guide. There are at present scores of highly trained men, of such cultivation as the museums cannot afford to employ except in the highest positions, who are spending weeks and months out of every year in this unpaid work of serving the public; while in the great public collections the ordinary inquirer is left adrift to find his way as best he can through the chaos of an improperly arranged exhibit. In the public collections the prints are of service or pleasure to almost nobody; while in the private collections their service and pleasure to the owner and his friends is great, and the same opportunities are easily opened to any one who is qualified to profit by them. Therefore it seems better that, upon the death of a collector, his prints should be sold; in order that, as Edmond de Goncourt directed in the case of his collection, those treasures which have been so great and so personal a delight to the owner may pass on into the hands of such others as will find in them the same satisfaction. "My wish is," he wrote in his will, "that my drawings, my prints, my curios, my books—in a word those things of art which have been the joy of my life—shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my own taste."