Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/26

 in America, but the comparatively few recorded prints by Sharaku not found here are represented by photographs taken from reproductions in books and catalogues. Borrowing from the Matsukata collection which has thirteen out of the twenty-eight subjects we lack, has been made impossible by the rules governing National Treasures and the decisions of experts in regard to lending; and neither the locating nor the bringing together of certain other unique or nearly unique examples that are known to have been in various European collections before the World War could have been undertaken without a far greater expenditure of time and money than we had at our command. America, however, may be proud of the fact that from collections here we have been able to assemble a larger showing of prints by Sharaku than ever has been brought together before, even at that monumental exhibition held in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1911; and it may be added that whenever more than one impression of the same subject was located we have endeavored always to choose the finest.

Herr Rumpf lists 134 prints which he believes to be by Sharaku and reproduces 130 of them. The four that he had heard of but could neither identify nor reproduce we will discuss first, following his numbering for them of 131 to 134.

The first of these is known only through a brief reference in an unillustrated article, the writer of which is unable to identify the print, and we think that this may safely be eliminated. The second, Rumpf number 132, turns out to be the same as his number 64—our number 55. Rumpf’s number 133 was known to him only through a description in a Sotheby auction catalogue, but a priced copy of that catalogue which we have shows that when the print came to be sold the auctioneer stated that it was by Shunyei and not by Sharaku, which means that it was one of those fairly numerous prints from which the signature of Shunyei, or sometimes that of Toyokuni, has been taken out and that of Sharaku put in. It cannot be counted as among the works of the artist with whom we are now concerned. Number 134 we have in the identical impression described.

Let us now turn to the 130 subjects reproduced by Rumpf. He himself doubted the authenticity of his numbers 43 and 130, and we have eliminated the first of the two from our list but have accepted the other as genuine. These four eliminations reduce Rumpf’s list of known prints by Sharaku to 130, and of these we can show 102 originals with photographs