Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/23

 of Sharaku, and some discussion of the legend that has grown up about him in the popular imagination of the Occident until his unknown personality, the unknown facts of his life have come to be consistently spoken of in Europe and America as tragic.

In Japan the name of Sharaku remained practically unknown and completely disregarded until it was called forcibly to the attention of his countrymen by the growth of his fame in Europe. The earlier Occidental books on Japanese prints gave comparatively little space to him, but the French who were leaders in such matters had been eagerly collecting his works for a number of years when in 1910 a German enthusiast, Dr. Julius Kurth, published the first book on Sharaku in any language and succeeded in listing therein about 70 subjects, 57 of which he was able to reproduce. Herr Kurth unfortunately had drawn his information and his examples mainly from German collections, and he does not seem to have put himself to the trouble and expense of going to Paris; but in January of the following year the French collectors exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs 105 Sharaku subjects some few of which were also shown in second states, and all of which were illustrated in fully adequate size but without very much text, in the superbly printed catalogue of the exhibition, which is known from the names of its compilers, as the Vignier-Inada Catalogue. At that time the greatest collections of Japanese prints in the world were in France; and in so far as Sharaku was concerned the honors remained with the French until 1932 when Fritz Rumpf published a work of painstaking and scholarly research in which he described 134 prints which he accepted as by Sharaku, and reproduced 130 of them in wholly inadequate size, largely through rephotographing other reproductions. By that time, however, a number of books and articles about Sharaku had begun to appear in Japan; and because of the death of some of the great Parisian collectors as well as the tragedy of the World War and the enormous increase of interest in other countries, the majority of the really important collections of Japanese prints were to be found no longer in France but in Japan itself and in America—especially in America.

The Sharaku legend, to which reference has been made, was an invention of the Occident and was based on a theory that the shortness of the artist’s working period was the result of what most western critics have considered the savagely satiric quality in his portraits of the popular theatrical idols of his time. It has been thought that both the actors