KOBE || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Alfred East (British painter) 1844 - 1913
A Distant View of Kobe and the Inland Sea (Japanese Tea Garden in Kobe), 1889-90
oil on canvas
90 x 152 cm. (35.42 x 59.84 in.)
signed and dated '89.90/ALFRED/EAST' (lower right), Japanese hanko name stamp (lower left)
private collection

Catalogue Note Bonhams
In 1888, the Managing Director of the Fine Art Society, Marcus Bourne Huish, a noted japoniste, brought an interesting commission to Alfred East, one of the rising stars of British landscape painting. He would travel to Japan in order to record its countryside and the way of life of its people.1 Prior to this, artists' exploration of the exotic 'land of the rising sun' was restricted, and the first travellers were not encouraged to venture beyond the 'concession' ports. Huish was probably motivated by the recent success of his rival, the Dowdeswell Gallery, which had dispatched Mortimer Menpes to Japan the previous year. Yet beyond its streets and shopfronts, the Australian painter had not strayed. And thus, East was given a brief that while it was not explicitly topographical – photographs could do that – was to address the spirit of the place and capture its colours, shapes and forms.

The artist set sail from Tilbury on 13 December 1888 with three travelling companions, Charles Holme, later editor of The Studio, and Mr and Mrs Arthur Lazenby Liberty, proprietors of the famous Regent Street department store.2 After brief stops in Egypt, Ceylon, Hong Kong and China, they eventually anchored in Nagasaki harbour in March 1889. East was instantly charmed by what he found and when his companions moved on, he remained, sketching in the town. They had agreed to rendez-vous at Kobe three weeks later, and again, from there, East elected to travel alone, accompanied by his 'boy', Yoshi, to Osaka and Kyoto. From there he moved on to Lake Biwa, and on to Tokyo where he bade farewell to his fellow-travellers who were going back to Britain. He then visited Hakone and voyaged overland, north to Nikko, before his own eventual return to London in September.

East's vantage point for the present canvas, the largest he may have begun in Japan, shows the recently established Treaty port of Kobe across the calm bay area at the north-eastern extremity of the Inland Sea (Seto-no Uchi Umi). The large island of Shikoku, unseen, lies off to the left and the hills beyond the port are those of the Rokkõ range. Most of East's other Japanese works are small oil sketches, watercolours and drawings. The extended dating for A Distant view of Kobe and the Inland Sea - '89-90', close to East's signature, lower right - suggests that the work was completed soon after his return and in time for his Fine Art Society exhibition. This is likely to be confirmed by the hanko or name stamp, a transliteration of East's name into Japanese characters, visible in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas.

For his part, the artist was unimpressed by modern Kobe and after a day's shopping he records that he 'went to a little village with clustering gardens of plum blossoms'. Working in the 'keen and bracing' air under a 'powerful' sun his face was 'almost raw' and the following day, his boy had to hold a borrowed umbrella over his head as painted.3 We may assume that these jottings refer to the realisation of the present work.

When it was exhibited in the Fine Art Society, a lengthy note in the catalogue by Dr JA Junker explains that although Kobe was a modern 'European' city, the roots of its ancient centre dated back to Kiyo-Mori, the Japanese ruler of the twelfth century and 'the site and the environs ... are of unsurpassed beauty'.4 The viewpoint is taken from the entrance to a tea-house on the road to Osaka, at the village of Sumi-yoshi, which includes a small Shinto shrine signified by the characteristic Tori gateway on the right of the canvas. To the left, the barley fields, now fresh and green, roll away towards the sea. The weary traveller's approach to the tea-house (Chi-ya) which marks the entrance to the shrine, is signalled by lanterns and sign-boards. According to Junker, this specific canvas showing the port and its adjacent fields was, 'of truly Japanese character', having been selected because it was 'not marred by foreign influence'.5

While this may be true, East was clearly unwilling to sacrifice the advances of the western naturalistic landscape tradition and in A Distant view of Kobe and the Inland Sea he returns to a classic compositional format that takes us back to canvases recently produced in the Vale of Teith in Scotland. Works such as The Land between the Lochs (unlocated) frequently frame a vista of river or lake with trees on the right. The essential difference here of course, being that 'Ya-Ye', the eight-fold white plum blossom, resplendent at this time of year, is that favoured by Japanese printmakers and echoed in the japoniste pastiches of Vincent Van Gogh. Blossom was of course, the motif selected for the design of East's private view card [fig. 1].

East's exhibition drew plaudits from the press because, as one critic remarked, unlike 'cloudcuckootown' representations of the country, he was 'diving into reality'.6 More specifically, in the present work, a reviewer found 'one of the best landscapes Mr East has ever painted', its 'limpid air' being like 'that of Normandy in May'.7 Elsewhere the press waxed lyrical. The picture was among 'the chief successes of the exhibition', and 'admirable for its rendering of suffused light and space, and for the subtle skill with which the brilliant local tints are harmonized'. These are typical of the expressions of approval.8 Referring to the 'soft warm colouring of Japanese landscapes', The Yorkshire Post, waxed poetical on, 'the still quiet beauty of its inland seas' that,
... find adequate expression equally with the rural life of its sunny hearted people, with their pretty tea-houses embowered in foliage, their quaint temples, their charming ladies promenading beneath plum trees aglow with glorious white bloom ...9

In a more expansive note, the Glasgow Herald placed East's work in the context of that of his peers. While Mortimer Menpes, two years earlier, had made a 'painter's dream' of Japanese life, he had 'made the country the field of an extensive and detailed exploration'; he had gone beyond the tourist trails and was quite unaffected by the current 'Japanese fad' in London.10 Arguably, in artistic terms, this had begun with Whistler's japonisme of the 1860s, but it was set to develop rapidly in the ensuing decades with the spread of Aestheticism. Following the Iwakura Mission of senior diplomats from the Meiji government in 1872, and the extensive trade links which were established, the British fascination with Japan developed rapidly with the founding of a small colourful Japanese community in Knightsbridge and in 1885, the popular imagination was caught by the first production of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's The Mikado. East, however, had provided a new perspective that took the serious observer way beyond the 'mighty troops of Titipu'.

So popular was the exhibition that two-thirds of the pictures were sold at the Private View. Their appearance coincided with the publication of Siegfried Bing's sumptuous Artistic Japan, the scholarly writings of William Anderson, former doctor to the British Legation in Japan, and ultimately, some eighteen months after his exhibition, contributed to the formation of the Japan Society, of which East was a founder member. Back in the spring of 1890 however, the Huish commission had left him ill and exhausted.11 In April he set off to Italy for rest and recuperation, and although he was never to repeat the arduous journey to Japan, it remained continuously in his thoughts and gave rise to his own 'painter's dream', in works such as Sayanara, 1897 (Private Collection), The Land of the Rising Sun, 1904 [fig. 2] and Haru-no-Yuki (Snow in Spring), 1906 (unlocated). And although these reveries splendidly evoke that lingering oriental love affair, they lack the vital freshness of the warm spring day in 1890 when, heedless of the sun, East stood by the entrance to a teahouse and looked over the Inland Sea towards Kobe.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

1P. Johnson and K. McConkey, Alfred East, Lyrical Landscape Painter, 2009 (Sansom & Co), pp.15-18, 44-47
2See Sir Hugh Cortazzi ed. & introd., A British Artist in Meiji Japan, 1991 (In Print, Special ed. to commemorate the centenary of the Japan Society); Toni Huberman, Sonia Ashmore and Yasuko Suga eds., The Diary of Charles Holme's 1889 Visit to Japan and North America, 2008 (Global Oriental); Liberty's journal (Private Collection) remains unpublished.
3Cortazzi ed., p.26
4Dr J.A. Junker, (Introduction and Notes), Catalogue of a Collection of Pictures and Drawings of Japan by Alfred East RA, The Fine Art Society, 1890, p.23
5 ibid, p.6
6 The Spectator, 'Art – The Japanese Exhibition', 15 March 1890, p.373; quoted in Johnson and McConkey, 2009, p.46
7 The Magazine of Art, 'The Chronicle of Art', 1890
8 Pall Mall Gazette, 'Japan in Bond Street', 6 March 1890, p.2; The Graphic, 'Pictures of Japan', 15 March 1890, p.19
9 Yorkshire Post, 'Notes on Current Topics', 3 March 1890, p.4
10 Glasgow Herald,'Our London Correspondent', 3 March 1890, p.9
11H. Quilter, The Universal Review, from Notes by Alfred East, 'A Trip to Japan', 1890, vol.6, pp.331-346, 508-522.