Views and Costumes of China & Japan

This exhibition is comprised of a collection of prints from the studio of Baron Franz von Stillfried, an Austrian photographer practising in Japan in the 1870's. Images of landscapes, Shinto Temples and villages are complemented with portraits of performers, pallanquin carriers, doctors and street vendors. Individually each one is an image of great beauty, as a whole however, they provide a wealth of social history information about late 19th century Japan.

Franz von Stillfried ran a studio in Yokohama at the same time as his brother Raimund, who was also known as 'Baron Stillfried'. This caused a great deal of confusion with the local residents and visitors to Japan in the Meiji Period, and with art historians today. The album, which dates from 1879-83, comprises 67 separate mounted prints presented in a lacquerware box. Albums of this kind were popular among foreign tourists, who frequently selected the individual prints they wished to be included from the studio's collection. Many of these albumen prints have been hand-tinted. This was a laborious process for which von Stillfried employed, at the height of his success, a substantial number of Japanese workers.

The von Stillfried images are part of a larger collection of Japanese material owned by Dr. Henry Dyer LLD one time principal of the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. The Dyer family donated these to Edinburgh City Libraries and Information Services in the 1940's and 50's. As well as the images by von Stillfried, also gifted were Japanese prints, consisting of 8 albums, 9 kakemonos or hanging pictures, 3 makimonos or rolling pictures, and many original watercolour sketches and woodcuts. Artists represented are Kunisada (1786-1865), a pupil of Toyokuni and a member of the Utagawa school; Hiroshige (1798-1858), one of the foremost landscape artists; Sadahide (c.1840), a pupil of Kunisada; and Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), a member of the Toyokuni school.