Page 17 - Christies March 15 2017 Fujita Museum

Yamanaka, now no longer trading, had branches around the world until 1944. Yamanaka Kichirōbei
(Shunkōdō, 1845–1917) was the leader of the three Yamanaka family members who founded this art
dealership. Kichirōbei, who became president of Yamanaka Company around 1900, worked with
Fujita Denzaburō and also advised Kawasaki Shōzō, one of the richest men in Kobe (ship building,
banking and newspapers). The Yamanaka and Toda families even intermarried: Toda Tsuyuko married
Yamanaka Ryūtarō, the eldest son of the famous Kichirōbei.
Fujita Denzaburō acquired the bulk of his collection during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
He was exceptional for his broad, all-encompassing taste, covering the full range of Chinese and
Japanese art, and extending to Korean art, as well. During those years, many daimyo families, as
well as temples and shrines, fell on hard times and were forced to either neglect or sell their art.
Western collectors such as the Bostonian William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926) took advantage of
this dire situation and formed collections that now grace major museums in Europe and America. To
counteract the alarming outfow of patrimony spurred by an anti-Buddhist movement, three Meiji-
era collectors and business tycoons, Masuda Takashi, Akaboshi Yanosuke (1857–1904) and Fujita
Denzaburō, found themselves in agreement on one shared goal: Japanese art should remain in Japan.
They, too, saw that there was an opportunity to buy great things, and they stepped up.

Exhibition space and galleries in the Fujita Museum.
藤田美術館内部陳設。

We know that Fujita acquired many works that were being sold of by impoverished temples at this
time: in 1906, he acquired a standing wood fgure of the bodhisattva Jizō from Kōfukuji Temple, Nara.
That work, by the great thirteenth–century sculptor Kaikei, is now a registered Important Cultural
Property. That same year, Masuda Takashi acquired sixty of the small, twelfth-century Thousand
Kannon statues from Kōfukuji—all on one day, and sold ffty of them to Fujita, who, around the same
time, acquired three early eighth-century clay fgures from one of the groups of sculptures on the
ground foor interior of the pagoda of Hōryūji Temple, Nara.

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