Ernest F. Fenollosa

Ernest F. Fenollosa (born Feb. 18, 1853, Salem, Mass., U.S.—died Sept. 21, 1908, London, Eng.) was an American Orientalist and educator who made a significant contribution to the preservation of traditional art in Japan.

Fenollosa studied philosophy and sociology at Harvard, graduating in 1874. During his student years he had taken up painting. At the invitation of Edward Sylvester Morse, an American zoologist and Orientalist then teaching at Tokyo Imperial University, Fenollosa in 1878 joined the university to lecture (in English) on political science, philosophy, and economics. At this early stage in the Meiji Restoration, traditional art—and many of Japan’s ancient temples and shrines and their art treasures—were falling into neglect amid the national drive to modernize. Fenollosa interested himself in their preservation and became a student of the themes and techniques of traditional Japanese art and, before long, an articulate advocate of honouring and preserving those themes and techniques.

In 1881 Fenollosa financed an exhibition in Tokyo of representative Japanese art and in 1882 gave a notable lecture titled “Bijutsu shinsetsu” (“The True Theory of Art”). His views interested painters such as Kanō Hōgai and Hashimoto Gahō, who became pioneers in a movement to revive the Japanese school of painting, largely inspired by Fenollosa. In this period he took up the study of Japanese nß theatre, eventually translating some 50 of its texts and playing a significant role in the preservation of this traditional art form from the drive for modernization. His studies and travels and his quick fluency in Japanese and, later, Chinese brought him wide acquaintance with Buddhist monks and teachers, and during the 1880s he embraced Buddhism.

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A Study of Poetry

In 1886 Fenollosa and his friend the art critic Okakura Kakuzō were commissioned by the government to tour Europe studying methods of teaching and preserving the fine arts. As Fenollosa left temporarily for the United States, the emperor Meiji said to him, “You have taught my people to know their own art,” and charged him to teach it to Americans. After returning to Tokyo, Fenollosa helped to found (1887) the Tokyo Fine Arts School and to draft a law for the preservation of temples and shrines and their art treasures.

For five years, from 1890, Fenollosa headed the Oriental department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where his own great collection of some 1,000 paintings, sold earlier, was housed. There, heeding the emperor’s injunction, he did much to further appreciation of Oriental art in the United States. His East and West: The Discovery of America and Other Poems appeared in 1893. He visited Japan briefly in 1896 and returned in 1897 for a longer stay, but by that time many Japanese scholars wished themselves to take control of the preservation of their artistic heritage. His reception by the Japanese academic establishment was therefore cool, and he was offered only the post of English-language instructor at the Imperial Normal School (for trainee teachers). Feeling rebuffed, he returned to the United States in 1900 to become a professor at Columbia University.

He began a fourth journey to Japan in 1908 but died in London en route. His ashes were taken to Japan and buried at the Mii temple in Kyōto, whose beautiful hillside setting was his favourite memory of Japan. Before his death he had completed a first draft of his two-volume masterpiece Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art but left many names of painters and temples incomplete. His second wife saw to the correction of most of the omissions and errors, and the work was published in 1912. His widow also turned over to Ezra Pound a large body of her husband’s translations of early Chinese poetry and Japanese Nō dramas, which Pound reworked into English poetic form and published to great acclaim in 1915–17.