Product Description: The complex and coherent development of Japanese art during the course of the nineteenth century was inadvertently disrupted by a political event: the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Scholars of both the preceding Edo (1615â€"1868) and the succeeding Meiji (1868â€"1912) eras have shunned the decades bordering this arbitrary divide, thus creating an art-historical void that the former view as a period of waning technical and creative inventiveness and the latter as one threatened by Meiji reforms and indiscriminate Westernization and modernization...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays by an international team of scholars provides essential background on the administrative, social, and economic, as well as the artistic, history of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912).

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Product Description: Soon after Japan was opened up to the West in 1868, a new world opened up to the Japanese painters. In the midst of an atmosphere of rapid change and many new influences, some painters chose to immerse themselves in tradition; some looked almost entirely to the West for inspiration; and still others chose to transcend the past by merging Japanese tradition and Western influences...read more