330 ART INDUSTRY AND RELATED OCCUPATIONS. 



These gifts, as well as all the other industrial products of Japan 

 which may have reached the Iberian and Italian peninsulas at this 

 time, did not exercise any direct influence upon the art industry of 

 those countries any more than did the Portuguese priests and mer- 

 chants at that time trading there.^ As these latter were banished 

 from the country during the first decades of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, Europe found she had gained little from her eighty years of 

 intercourse with Japan save the increase in her historical and 

 ethnographical knowledge. This interesting country remained a 

 teri'a incognita for the naturalist particularly, and its investigation 

 in this respect was only begun toward the end of the century by 

 the German E. Kaempfer. 



During this long period (1624-1854), in which Holland alone 

 maintained and only in Nagasaki the intercourse of Europe with 

 Japan under very profitable but very humiliating conditions, many 

 valuable industrial Japanese products were brought to the Nether- 

 lands. For a long time after, these articles were, so to speak, foreign 

 to the rest of Europe, as they only reached the private collections 

 of individual princes. They were principally urn-shaped covered 

 vases, of Hizen porcelain, and even in Holland only exercised a 

 noticeable influence on ceramics. There flourished at that time 

 (1639- 1 764) the celebrated Faience manufactory of Lambertus 

 Cleffius in Delft. It followed the tendency of the time, and painted 

 its pictures on hard, burned tin enamel, while in the preceding 

 period the colours had been laid upon air-dried enamel sheaths, 

 and burned with them, so that the decorations were much lighter 

 and more delicate in form. 



The painters of the establishment were now greatly inspired 

 by the new decorative designs of the Japanese models, as were also 

 those of many other Dutch manufactories of the time, all of which 

 called their wares porcelain, some of even receiving patents for 

 their correct imitations of the Japanese, e.g.^ Pinaker. The Japan- 

 ese patterns were not followed in material, but in their forms, and 

 still more in their decorations. We find represented on the pro- 

 ducts of this expanded Dutch Faience industry, for instance, the 

 Botan [PcBonia Montan), the Mume [Primus Mume), the Matsu 

 (Pinus de7tsiJlora)y and other specimens of Japanese flora, also 

 cranes, silver herons, peacocks, etc, after their Japanese models. 



^ My hope to find these presents and other products of Japanese industrial 

 art of that time in the collections at Lisbon, Madrid, or Rome, or in Portuguese 

 cloisters, and so to have some firm basis for a judgment of the work of Japan 

 in the sixteenth century, was not fulfilled, greatly to my regret. The investiga- 

 tions which a well-informed friend made for me last year in Rome proved as 

 fruitless as my own in Madrid, Lisbon, and the vicinity. Don Fernando, the late 

 king and art patron, who was an excellent judge of industrial art-productions, 

 and who had the kindness to take me himself through the Lisbon collection, 

 was of the opinion that Portugal possessed nothing from that period. The 

 same is even more true of Spain, whose capital does not yet possess any 

 ethnographical or industrial art collection. 



