Description
The Museo Chiossone’s patrimony of Japanese and Chinese art was collected entirely in Japan by a great 19th-century Italian draughtsman and engraver, Edoardo Chiossone (1833–98), who worked in the Printing Bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Finance in Tokyo for twenty-three years, between 1875 and 1898, producing banknotes, government bonds, revenue stamps and postal stamps, thus making a concrete contribution to the financial and industrial innovation and modernisation of the Land of the Rising Sun in the last quarter of the 19th century. A respected portraitist, Chiossone also painted the celebrated portrait of Emperor Meiji that, reproduced in hundreds of thousands of exemplars and distributed throughout Japan and abroad, became the sovereign’s official image.
As an artist, Edoardo Chiossone was sensitive to the variety and vastness of Japanese fine and decorative arts, and it was his aim to amply document their art-historical development in a collection that is still today one of the most important in Europe.
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