Obsession: Sir William Van Horne's Japanese Ceramics 9780773554764

Table of contents :
Cover
Obsession
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Foreword
Part One
Introduction
The Nation Builder
Van Horne and Friends: Collecting European Art in Montreal’s Square Mile
Japan Contained: The Birth of the Asian Collections at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The “Social Life” of the Van Horne Japanese Ceramic Collection
The Ninsei Tea Bowl
Part Two
Van Horne’s Notebooks
Ceramics Catalogue
Case Studies
Bibliographies
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Additional Illustration Credits

Citation preview

Obsession

Obsession Sir William Van Horne s Japanese Ceramics

Edited by Ron Graham

Published for the Gardiner Museum, Toronto by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© The Gardiner Museum 2018 Published on the occasion of the exhibition Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics, organized by the Gardiner Museum. Gardiner Museum, Toronto 18 October 2018 to 20 January 2019

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal

Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil

19 November 2019 to 1 March 2020

des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a

“Foreword” © Kelvin Browne

des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie “Foreword” © Nathalie Bondil “Introduction” © Ron Graham

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

“The Nation Builder” © Peter C. Newman “Van Horne and Friends: Collecting European Art in

Obsession (Montréal, Québec)

Montreal’s Square Mile” © Janet M. Brooke

Obsession : Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese ceramics / edited

“Japan Contained: The Birth of the Asian Collections and

by Ron Graham.

the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts” © Laura Vigo “The “Social Life” of the Van Horne Japanese Ceramic

Includes bibliographical references.

Collection” © Akiko Takesue

Issued in print and electronic formats.

“The Ninsei Tea Bowl” © Akiko Takesue

ISBN 978-0-7735-5464-1 (cloth).

“Van Horne’s Notebooks” © Akiko Takesue

—ISBN 978-0-7735-5476-4 (ePDF)

“Ceramics Catalogue” © Akiko Takesue and Louise Cort “Case Studies” © Akiko Takesue

1. Van Horne, William Cornelius, Sir, 1843—1915 — Art collections. 2. Pottery, Japanese — Private collections — Québec (Province)

Editorial coordination and proofreading

— Montréal. 3. Pottery, Japanese — Collectors and collecting —

Natalie Hume

Québec (Province) — Montréal. 4. Businesspeople — Québec

Christine May

(Province) — Montréal — Biography. 5. Royal Ontario Museum.

Karine Tsoumis

6. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 7. Art Gallery of Ontario. I.

ISBN 978-0-7735-5464-1 (cloth)

Ceramic Art, issuing body III. Title.

Graham, Ron, 1948—, editor II. George R. Gardiner Museum of ISBN 978-0-7735-5476-4 (ePDF) NK4167.O27 2018 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018

738.0952

C2018-902080-6 C2018-902081-4

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

Minion 10.5/15

Contents

vii

Foreword Kelvin Browne

xi

Foreword Nathalie Bondil

Part One 3

Introduction Ron Graham

15

The Nation Builder Peter C. Newman

34

Van Horne and Friends: Collecting European Art in Montreal’s Square Mile Janet M. Brooke

56

Japan Contained: The Birth of the Asian Collections at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Laura Vigo

80

The “Social Life” of the Van Horne Japanese Ceramic Collection Akiko Takesue

104

The Ninsei Tea Bowl Akiko Takesue

Part Two 109

Van Horne’s Notebooks Akiko Takesue

121

Ceramics Catalogue Akiko Takesue, in consultation with Louise Cort

161

Case Studies Akiko Takesue

vi

185

Bibliographies

193

Contributors

194

Acknowledgments

196

Additional Illustration Credits

Contents

Kelvin Browne

Foreword

Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics is the nexus of many stories: a vast collection assembled by an obsessive collector; a portrait of a hard-nosed business tycoon and arts patron, Canada’s equivalent of a Henry Clay Frick; a period when Orientalism and colonial conquest informed the tastes of collectors; and a history of the brief, heady period when Montreal’s Golden Square Mile was one of the great centres of art consumption. Together, these threads weave the basis for a vivid and complex exhibition. Japanese ceramics, more specifically humble pottery made for the domestic market, was one of Van Horne’s great passions. Despite the remarkable number of pieces he bought – well over one thousand – what truly distinguished his collecting was his taxonomic compulsion. Van Horne was assiduous in his study and documentation, carefully illustrating each piece in his notebooks and painting some of them in large, stunning watercolours. Obsession reunites, for the first time, almost 350 ceramics from Sir William Van Horne’s now-dispersed collection, displaying them alongside archival material in an ambitious new way to convey the collecting impulse to today’s viewers, as well as offering insight into how these works were originally experienced. An exceptional case study in the history of collecting, the exhibition also offers an important opportunity to revisit assumptions about Canadian history and its grand personages through a contemporary lens. Like those of many nineteenth-century industrialists who benefited from the expansion of the railway in North America, Van Horne’s fortune was built at a cost. The Gardiner will explore some of the challenges presented by the traditional

Figure 1.1 Wyatt Eaton, Portrait of Sir William Van Horne, 1894, oil on canvas, 40.8 ! 32.4 cm. Gift of an anonymous donor, 1991, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC.

narrative – as typified in Peter C. Newman’s essay, originally published in 1959 – to open a discussion about the human impact on Chinese labourers and Canada’s First Nations that resulted from the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and which is indicative of the colonialist determination by which Van Horne obsessively built his collection. Furthermore, despite his recognized admiration for Japanese culture, Van Horne cast an imperialist gaze on the “exotic” Asian art objects that he acquired, an aspect of his collecting shared by his contemporaries, explored by Laura Vigo and Akiko Takesue in their contributions and addressed in the exhibition. And what of power, money, and building art collections for status and cultural influence? This practice is as evident today as it was during the Gilded Age, as demonstrated by Janet Brooke in her overview of the collecting ambitions of Montreal’s elite. All of these factors complicate the history of Van Horne’s collection of Japanese ceramics, making it more relevant and compelling than ever before. Rather than bury the narra-

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Kelvin Browne

tives of the past, we have the opportunity to question, discuss, and look at them afresh, as well as make room for new voices and perspectives. It was the exhibition’s curator, Ron Graham, my colleague for over a decade in my work at the Royal Ontario Museum, when he was the chair of the Institute of Contemporary Culture and then a trustee of the museum, who saw the possibility of this synthesis of art, history, and institutions to generate a landmark show. As well, he conceptualized a publication that captures the elements of the exhibition and amplifies its key themes through contributions by a diverse group of commentators. In classic impresario manner, Ron has brought everything and everyone together, including assistant curator Akiko Takesue, whose deep scholarship and meticulous attention to detail made the idea feasible; the brilliant architect Siamak Hariri, who designed the exhibition to honour the memory of Van Horne’s friends, the gifted Montreal architects William and Edward Maxwell; and graphic designer Paul Haslip of hm&e Design, a frequent Gardiner collaborator. We are also grateful for the advice and generosity of Sally Hannon and the invaluable expertise of Louise Cort, Curator of Ceramics at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, dc. Obsession brings together several of Canada’s most prominent cultural institutions: the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. We are delighted that the exhibition will travel to the mmfa in Montreal, the home of Sir William Van Horne. It’s an honour for the Gardiner to collaborate with such important Canadian cultural institutions. At the Gardiner Museum, we are particularly pleased when we can put ceramics in a broader context and present historical material in a nuanced manner that reveals its many facets, as well as its relevance to current issues that can spark powerful and timely discussions. Kelvin Browne Executive Director and ceo Gardiner Museum, Toronto

ix

Foreword

Nathalie Bondil

Foreword

Figure 2.1 Sir William Van Horne, Japanese Fête, signed Enroh Nav, 1893, oil on canvas, 76.2 ! 60.96 cm. Courtesy of James E. Lanigan. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

One day in 2014, an Asian art enthusiast noticed a curious Japanese ceramic piece in the form of a lotus blossom for sale in Toronto. The object – a koro, or portable incense burner – had an illustrious past. It is attributed to Ken’ya (Miura Totaro, 1821–1889), a Tokyo ceramicist of the school of Kenzan, whose creations, highly prized by those interested in Japanese art in the West, were sought after by major museums at the time. The railroad magnate, amateur painter, and art connoisseur Sir William Van Horne, in a handwritten catalogue of his collection dated 6 December 1892, sketched this unusual incense burner at No. 828. Though this valuable piece apparently remained in the possession of the family, it eventually made its way into the Van Horne collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, thanks to the generosity and astuteness of Philip Cheong (see plate 112). In 1944, the Montreal tycoon’s daughter, Ms Adaline Van Horne, donated a portion – a prodigious portion – of her father’s collection to the Art Association of Montreal (the original name of our museum), directed by the brilliant F. Cleveland Morgan. Among the 595 works were canvases by El Greco, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Tiepolo, Cézanne, Daumier, and Monet – mainstays of the permanent collection today – and a remarkable group of 220 Japanese ceramics. More than a century after the talented Van Horne’s death in 1915, his Japanese collection, now divided among several Canadian institutions and private collectors, has been brought together again to claim the renown it deserves as an outstanding collection that came to America from the Empire of the Sun at the turn of the twentieth century.

We thank our partner Kelvin Browne of the Gardiner Museum, who initiated this project, his staff, our lenders, and our experienced curators Ron Graham, Laura Vigo, and Akiko Takesue. Their investigations, backed by the research carried out by the authors of this book, have made possible the rebirth and, more particularly, recognition of this ensemble. On the occasion of the concurrent opening of the Stéphan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing for World Cultures and Togetherness, it is incumbent upon us to recount how our collections came to us, and through what constructive obsessions they were amassed. Nathalie Bondil Director General and Chief Curator The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Figure 2.2 Ken’ya (Miura Totaro, 1821–1889), portable incense burner in the shape of a lotus, 1850s–1889, stoneware. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

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Nathalie Bondil

Part One

Figure 3.1 Artist unknown, Japanese scroll depicting the Van Horne Family with dealer Akusawa Susumu, ca 1890, 128 ! 87 cm. Department of Tourism, Heritage & Culture, New Brunswick. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Ron Graham

Introduction

Sir William Van Horne was a man of extraordinary accomplishment. As general manager, he was the dynamo behind the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway during the 1880s. As corporate leader, he was named Laureate of the Century by the Canadian Business Hall of Fame in 2000. As patron of the arts, he put together one of the most impressive collections of European paintings and fine objects ever amassed in Canada. Though the story of his life has been featured in biographies, histories, tv documentaries, a memoir by the famous American poet/historian Carl Sandburg, and E.J. Pratt’s epic poem Towards the Last Spike, Van Horne may no longer be a familiar figure to many Canadians, or even, to some eyes, a heroic one. Peter C. Newman, Canada’s pre-eminent chronicler of the rich and powerful, seeks to address that with his classic portrait of Van Horne’s background, career, and astonishing vitality. First published in 1959, revised and updated by the author, Newman’s essay – succinct yet comprehensive, informative yet anecdotal – is a lively, engaging introduction to a lively, engaging personality.1 Janet M. Brooke moves beyond Van Horne the railway builder and businessman to consider Van Horne the art collector and his place within Montreal’s anglophone elite. As a distinguished curator and scholar, well-versed in both European art and the Square Mile collectors, Brooke brings new research and an erudite eye to her assessment of both the Van Horne collection and those of his friends.

It comes as a curious surprise, even to those who know of Van Horne’s reputation, to learn that his true obsession may not have been the cpr or making money or covering the walls of his Sherbrooke Street mansion with paintings by Rembrandt, El Greco, Turner, and Cézanne. His heart, maybe even his soul, seems to have been in the studying, buying, documenting, displaying, and handling of more than a thousand examples of Japanese ceramics, all intimately scaled and many with irregular contours. Here is a contemporary observation by Lord Shaughnessy, one of Van Horne’s closest business associates: “During the last seven or eight years of his Presidency, Van Horne’s loss of interest in his work was most pronounced. He had ceramics, pictures, and other things artistic on his mind almost continuously, and a wandering artist, of whom there was a drove always following his trail, could take his time and attention from Canadian Pacific matters of great importance.”2 It’s not without significance that Shaughnessy mentions ceramics ahead of paintings and other things artistic. Of all the treasures in his house, Van Horne chose to be alone with his Japanese ceramics, almost exclusively, in his private study (fig. 3.2). Once, after escorting a young visitor from one fabulous room to another, he claimed that, as much as he loved the paintings, he loved the Japanese ceramics even more.3 One is hard-pressed to go through the Van Horne archives in the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa) without being amazed by the notebooks, invoices, letters, photographs, index cards, inventories, and scraps of paper he devoted to his ceramics. There are the dozens of large watercolours with which he skilfully paid homage to them. And then there is the extraordinary scroll painting, set in an imaginary Japanese landscape, of the Van Horne family wearing Japanese kimonos (fig. 3.1). The Gardiner and the mmfa are fortunate to be able to exhibit a full range of these items, including all seven of Van Horne’s notebooks and most of his watercolours (which are being shown in rotation for conservation reasons). The exhibition also features a series of “case studies,” in which an object, its watercolour, and the notebook description have been placed side by side, in five instances with a contemporary photograph as well. While the catalogue is limited perforce to a selection of sample illustrations, it has the benefit of an explanatory text by Dr Akiko Takesue, the exhibition’s assistant curator, about the unique and remarkable notebooks written and drawn in Van Horne’s own hand.

4

Ron Graham

Figure 3.2 Artist unknown, Interior of William Van Horne’s residence, ca 1900. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e999908308.

5

Van Horne’s obsession is evident. The more complex question is why. Why these subtle “domestic” cups, bowls, and jars, rather than large, gorgeous Chinese vases or lovely, decorated Japanese porcelain that were made for the export market? That leads down a rabbit hole to other difficult questions. Did the taste or fashion for Asian objects change over time? Who were the dealers and collectors? What distinguishes a great collector from a compulsive hoarder or ostentatious plutocrat? Here the catalogue has the advantage over the exhibition, for it is able to bring together two renowned experts in the field of Asian art to suggest some answers.

Introduction

Akiko Takesue, formerly an academic advisor at the Royal Ontario Museum (rom) and curatorial fellow at the mmfa, currently exhibition research assistant at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, traces the influence of the Japanese curator/dealer Ninagawa Noritane on the American scholar Edward S. Morse, who then disseminated his enthusiasm for this more “authentic” tradition of Japanese art to museums, dealers, and collectors in New York, Boston, and Montreal. With her primary focus on the rom’s Van Horne collection, on which she wrote her PhD dissertation, she guides us through his purchases, his studies, his methodology, and what she brilliantly describes as the “social life” of his objects. Laura Vigo, curator of Asian art at the mmfa, adds to the discussion by placing Van Horne in the context of other collectors of Asian art in Montreal in his time. She persuasively demonstrates how a few like-minded men shared their passion for and knowledge of things Japanese with their city and with Canada by building and sustaining the mmfa and its collections. Without shying away from the issues of appropriation or decontextualization, these essays probe the complexity of Van Horne’s japonisme. He wasn’t much interested in the decorative pieces manufactured in China and Japan to suit the taste and fantasies of the Western market. On the contrary, his obsession was more scholarly than aesthetic, and it was based on a desire to try to understand what was truly authentic in Japanese culture as deeply as he could without speaking the language or even visiting its homeland. He and his family didn’t pose for the scroll painting as if going to a costume ball or playing with the exotic (fig. 3.1). They were portrayed in the company of a Japanese dealer, Akusawa Susumu, who likely commissioned the painting as a testament to Van Horne’s sincerity and erudition, in the same spirit as his beautiful colour drawing of Van Horne in the robe of Bodhidharma (fig. 11.4(2)). Montreal’s legendary Square Mile, with its stately mansions, its refined collections, and its concentrated wealth was like a rare orchid in one of its many conservatories: beautiful, ephemeral, and fragile. It seeded, blossomed to its full glory, and faded within a remarkably short time, roughly between Confederation and the Great War. In the years that followed, few people lamented the passing of Anglo-Quebec’s Gilded Age, not the working classes who struggled through the Depression, not the Canadian nationalists who sought to eradicate the last vestiges of the British Empire, not the Québécois nationalists who viewed the English-speaking minority as conquerors in control of the province’s economy.

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Ron Graham

Figure 3.3 Wm. Notman & Son, William Van Horne’s Residence, ca 1890. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e999908306.

The fate of the Van Horne fortune was an extreme version of a common tale. Sir William built it from nothing in a couple of decades. Of his two surviving children, his daughter, Adaline, lived and died unmarried, while his son, Richard Benedict, married into the famous Molson clan, proved incapable of consolidating his father’s success, and passed away at the age of fiftyfour from alcoholism. Sir William’s only grandchild, his much-beloved Billy, met a similarly sad end at the even younger age of thirty-nine. The only greatgrandchild, Beverley Ann, Billy’s daughter by his first marriage, was thricemarried, embroiled in a society scandal when she accidentally shot a man to death at a drinking party, and ended up inheriting little more than the family summer home in New Brunswick and a legacy from her aunt.4 The bulk of

7

Introduction

the estate was left to Billy’s second wife, Margaret (née Hannon), who bequeathed it to her brother, who bequeathed it to his widow, who bequeathed it to her children. In their essays, Janet M. Brooke, Akiko Takesue, and Laura Vigo follow Van Horne’s great collection as it made its way out of the bloodline and into the museums, the auction houses, and the sales rooms. A fire destroyed or damaged several precious artworks in April 1933. Twenty important paintings were sold at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1946, and two allotments of Japanese ceramics at Sotheby’s in London in 1968. The coup de grâce came in September 1973, when a developer demolished the Van Horne house in the middle of the night, an act of vandalism fraught with symbolism (fig. 3.4). Montrealers woke up to the patrimony being lost to them forever, and a group of concerned citizens established the preservation lobby Save Montreal.5

Figure 3.4 Allan R. Leishman, Demolition of William Van Horne’s House in Progress, Montreal, Quebec, 10 September 1973. Library and Archives Canada, Montreal Star fonds, a159640. © Woodbridge Company Limited

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Ron Graham

Even today, in light of Canada’s long-overdue recognition of the negative impact of the development of the country on the lives and cultures of the Indigenous peoples, we might ask ourselves whether Van Horne’s reputation shouldn’t be torn down as well. The building of the cpr unarguably contributed to the suppression of the Northwest Rebellion and the influx of settlers and tourists into the West, as well as the exploitation of thousands of Chinese labourers.6 As such, William Van Horne shares in a collective responsibility, along with every navvy who hammered a spike, every worker who tilled the soil, and every Canadian who reaped the benefits of the National Dream. His individual responsibility is less obvious. The cpr wasn’t his policy, it was his job. The larger impact of the CPR on Indigenous peoples, land, and Canadian identity can be understood from a range of perspectives. The Van Horne collection points to the social and economic structures at play at the formation of the nation. Among Van Horne’s proudest accomplishments, in fact, was the agreement he helped arrange with the Blackfoot tribal council to allow the “iron road” to be built across their land in exchange for what was then considered fair compensation. Crowfoot, their powerful leader, was said to have treasured his lifetime rail pass as a symbol of the honour and deference he felt he had received from the man he called “Great Chief of the Railway” (fig. 3.5). It was designed by Van Horne himself and attached to an imposing nickel chain worn by Crowfoot.7 Though the exhibition and catalogue aim to encourage such political, historical, and cultural debates, they can be seen as a heavy burden to place upon a collection of small, vulnerable, innocent pots. Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics is less about theory or Van Horne than it is about 347 objects that have been reassembled for the first time, mostly from the rom and the mmfa. By illustrating each one of them, with up-to-date descriptions provided by Akiko Takesue and Louise Cort, curator for ceramics at the Freer/Sackler in Washington, dc, the catalogue makes the museums’ holdings accessible to scholars and lovers of Japanese ceramics as never before. The pieces that remained available represent only about a quarter of the original collection, but they are sufficient in their quantity, character, and diversity to give an accurate indication of Van Horne’s ambition and taste. Unfortunately, the one thing that neither the exhibition nor the catalogue can convey is perhaps the one thing that best explains his obsession: touch. As a boy, Van Horne was mad about collecting fossils. As a man, he moved from fossils to ceramics. In that, I think, is the clue to what he loved about

9

Introduction

Figure 3.5 Chief Crowfoot wearing his lifetime rail pass. William James Topley, Portrait of Isapo-Muxika, April 1891. Library and Archives Canada, a009256.

Japanese domestic ware: their earthy tones, their organic shapes, their tactile textures. He loved to sketch them, he loved to paint them, he loved to look at them, but, above all, he loved to feel them with his hands. To fully appreciate the exquisite beauty that Van Horne saw in what others may view as odd, rough pieces, you’ll probably need to begin a collection of your own, however modest, however inexpensive, and use it, as he did, to look very, very closely and with a loving eye. “The best thing a boy can do is to begin to collect,” William Van Horne once remarked. “Let him collect something – I don’t care what it is – and you will find he begins to notice, and from noticing he begins to classify and to arrange. Interest develops, and wherever he goes there is nothing connected with his collection about which he is not keenly interested.”8

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Ron Graham

n otes 1 The original version appeared in Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada’s Greatest Businessmen, 1959. It serves here as a reference that brings to life, and can make us question, Van Horne’s multi-layered identity as an aesthete, nation-building industrialist, colonial accumulator, and more. 2 Thomas Shaughnessy to Walter Vaughan, 8 May 1920, quoted in Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 278. 3 Quoted by Edgar Andrew Collard, The Gazette, 20 Oct. 1990. 4 Sullivan, Minister’s Island, 141, 150. See also Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 430–1. 5 In 1975, Save Montreal merged into Heritage Montreal under the leadership of the architect Phyllis Lambert. See Germain and Rose, Montréal, 88. See also Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 432. 6 See Daschuk, Clearing the Plains. 7 Lavallée, Van Horne’s Road, 267. Also, Berton, The Great Railway, vol. 2, The Last Spike, 1881–1885, 235–7; Smith, “Chiefs Journey.” 8 Sarah Macnaughtan, My Canadian Memories, Chapman & Hall, London, 1920, 101. Also quoted in Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 26.

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Introduction

Van Horne was now the spokesman for the West, The champion of an all-Canadian route, The Yankee who had come straight over, linked His name and life with the Canadian nation. Besides, he had infected the whole camp. Whether acquired or natural, the stamp Of faith had never left his face. Was it The artist’s instinct which had made the Rockies And thence the Selkirks, scenes of tourist lure, As easy for the passage of an engine As for the flight of eagles? Miracles Became his thought: the others took their cue From him. They read the lines upon his lips. Excerpt from E.J. Pratt, Towards the Last Spike (Toronto: Macmillan, 1952), 40–1.

Figure 4.1 Opposite Donald A. Smith holding spike driver, William Van Horne at his right. Alexander Ross, Driving the last spike of the CPR, Craigellachie, British Columbia, 7 November 1885. Library and Archives Canada, Charles Berkeley Powell fonds, c011371.

Figure 5.1 Wm. Notman & Son, Portrait of William and Adaline Van Horne with Their Grandson, ca 1906–07. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e999908307.

Peter C. Newman

The Nation Builder

William Cornelius Van Horne was born in 1843 outside Chelsea, Illinois, the son of a pioneer lawyer. He died at Montreal in 1915, a Canadian citizen, a British knight, and a multi-millionaire, mourned by the land he had welded into a nation through his building of the Canadian Pacific Railway – a task of dimensions greater than any on this continent could ever be again. During his eleven years as president of the cpr, Van Horne transformed a debt-saddled line into the world’s largest transportation system, then gave up his position to fling a railroad across Cuba. He helped modernize the Toronto, Montreal, Saint John, and Winnipeg tramway systems. He served as president of the Canadian Salt Company, Laurentide Pulp Company, and the Canada Northwest Land Company. His position on the boards of more than forty major corporations made him one of Canada’s most influential businessmen. Money and power were to him only the desirable complements to the enormous zest he expended in his frantic drive for achievement. He was an untrained but academically honoured palaeontologist. He invented a grasshopper killer and an avalanche deflector. He plotted the St Lawrence Seaway half a century before it was built. When World War I was declared, he invented a magnetic device to detect enemy submarines, though the British Admiralty rejected it without a trial. As plump as a bearded Bacchus, Van Horne could propel his chubby limbs with remarkable agility. His frequent chuckling swelled inevitably into blasts of belly-pumping laughter. A gourmand on the prodigious scale, he declared after

being knighted by Queen Victoria that the Van Horne coat of arms would be a horn announcing “dinner” above the head of a wild-eyed work ox. He accompanied his nightly poker games by munching biscuits heaped with black caviar, washing them down with neat whisky. During his railway inspection tours, he would telegraph ahead to the next stop for two roast-chicken dinners, then eat them both. At the office Van Horne blew cigar smoke into the faces of his callers with the punctuated impudence of a spouting whale. When his doctor strictly limited him to three cigars a day, Van Horne meekly agreed. By next morning he had ordered a box of specially rolled one-foot perfectos, and so puffed contentedly the prescribed three a day, for two hours each. Few men have nourished such flamboyant ambitions and even fewer have lived to witness their fulfillment. Yet Van Horne believed that he had not properly utilized even a fraction of his capacity. “When I think of all I could do,” he said as he lay dying, “I should like to live five hundred years.” Van Horne was a descendant of Jan Cornelissen Van Horne, a prominent settler in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later known under British rule as New York. William’s father, Cornelius, abandoned a prosperous city law career to homestead near Chelsea, thirty-five miles southwest of Chicago. When William, the first of five children, was eight, the family moved to Joliet, Illinois, where the senior Van Horne revived his legal practice and was elected its first mayor. The youngster’s Sunday hobby was to burrow into cliffs, searching for fossils. He was so fascinated by Edward Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology, lent him by a school chum, that he copied the volume’s 418 pages in pencil on sheets of foolscap late into the night for five weeks – illustrations, footnotes, index, and all. “The copying of that book did great things for me,” he said later. “It taught me how much could be accomplished by application.” Even as an adult, his palaeontological obsession became so absorbing that, once, when he saw a perfect trilobite outline embedded in a stone slab on the main street of a town, he returned at night with a hammer and chipped it out. During a lifetime of fossil gathering, Van Horne discovered and classified many new specimens. Nine officially bear the descriptive suffix: Van Hornei. In 1854, Cornelius Van Horne died suddenly in the cholera epidemic, leaving a good name but very little money. William helped to support his family by delivering telegrams, which put him in a position to study the tap of the telegraph instrument. At age thirteen, having quit school after being harshly

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Peter C. Newman

Figure 5.2 Wm. Notman & Son, Portrait of William Van Horne, ca 1905. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e999908304.

punished for drawing caricatures of his teachers, he got a job as a telegrapher with the Illinois Central Railway but it came to a sudden end after a year. He had wired a steel plate in sight of his office to give passing yardmen a mild but startling electric shock, and he was fired when the local superintendent received the Van Horne hot foot. But he had made good use of the opportunity to understand the key operations of railroading, a knowledge he subsequently applied to a succession of training positions with the Chicago & Alton.

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The Nation Builder

He exercised his prodigious memory by wagering on the number of cars that had been attached to passing freights. He invented a primitive cold storage to help preserve the butter shipments of local farmers. He rose from superintendent of telegraphs to general superintendent by the age of twenty-nine. In 1867, Van Horne married Lucy Adaline Hurd. She was a civil engineer’s daughter whose beauty had won her the right to read the city’s welcoming address when Abraham Lincoln visited Galesburg, Illinois, to debate Stephen Douglas in the famous senatorial campaign of 1858. While Van Horne was general manager of the St Louis, Kansas City & Northern, a Chicago & Alton subsidiary, Addy came down with smallpox. Rather than quarantine her in the municipal “pesthouse,” he moved her to the attic and alone nursed her through the day, working at night so that none of his staff would be infected. Van Horne resigned from the Chicago & Alton in 1874 to take charge of the Southern Minnesota Railroad in La Crosse, Wisconsin. As president of a railway – albeit only 167 miles long and in receivership – he was free for the first time to apply his imagination without the hindrance of conservative seniors. During his first year of management, operating expenses dropped from 72 to 56 per cent of earnings. His was the first railroad to subsidize farmers who settled along its tracks. When a grasshopper plague threatened their crops, he developed horsedrawn sheet-iron pans smeared with tar to kill the insects. “It’s all very well your turning to prayers,” he told groups of farmers, “but I don’t believe it will move the grasshoppers. What you’ve got to do is take your coats off and hustle!” While general superintendent of the much-larger Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul, he became reacquainted with James Jerome Hill, a stock promoter born near Guelph, Ontario, whose Great Northern later made him one of America’s most important railway builders. Hill was a partner with Donald Smith and George Stephen in the St Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba running into Winnipeg. From Hill, Van Horne first heard the details of the great railroad enterprise being planned in Canada – then a blank area on US maps, marked “British Possessions.” The first paragraph of the 1871 pact that brought British Columbia into Confederation stated that the West Coast must be linked with the rest of Canada by a railway within ten years. But less than three hundred miles of the transcontinental railroad had been built by February 1881, when Donald Smith, George Stephen, and James Hill incorporated the Canadian

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Pacific Railway Company. “You need a man of great mental and physical power to carry this line through,” Hill insisted. “Van Horne can do it.” Smith and Stephen interviewed him, and agreed. Van Horne arrived in Winnipeg on the last day of 1881. It was forty below, and a searing Arctic wind obstructed even across-the-street visibility. He set up his headquarters and began one of history’s toughest construction jobs. His assignment was to lay 2,900 miles of track across a barely surveyed continent. He boldly announced he would lay five hundred miles of track in 1882. By train, boat, wagon, and on horseback, he ranged the Prairies – firing, hiring, commanding. “Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking,” remarked the Winnipeg Sun. “So is a she-mule, and so is a buzz-saw.” By the end of the season, Van Horne’s heroic “army” of ten thousand men surpassed his seemingly impossible goal, if branch lines and sidings are included. There remained the difficult Rockies and Lake Superior sections. The cpr charter stipulated that its road would cross the mountains through Yellowhead Pass, the route recommended by Sir Sandford Fleming and seven other engineers. Van Horne inspected the suggested path, and then made his decision.

Figure 5.3 J.W. Bengough, Van Breaks the Trans-Continental Record. McMaster University Libraries, J.W. Bengough fonds, Grip, Toronto, 16 May 1891.

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Figure 5.4 Henry Joseph Woodside, William Van Horne at Lardo City, Kootenay Lake, British Columbia, June 1903. Library and Archives Canada, Henry Joseph Woodside fonds, a016036.

“Those surveys,” he announced, “will no doubt prove of great value to future alpinists. But I’m building a railroad.” He picked instead the more southerly Kicking Horse Pass. When construction was held up by an engineer’s refusal to drive his locomotive over a swaying trestle, Van Horne clambered into the cab himself. “Well, if you ain’t afraid, I guess I ain’t either,” reasoned the abashed engineer. They got across safely. Van Horne then turned his energies to the even tougher construction problem of the Lake Superior link. When the cpr syndicate was formed, Hill and Smith agreed that the Superior section could not produce profitable traffic.

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Peter C. Newman

Instead of building the cpr around the northern shore of the lake, they decided to put in a spur line running into a branch of the St Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba at Sault Ste Marie. “Using Mr. Hill’s line,” Van Horne protested to the directors, “plainly puts the mighty cpr at his tender mercies.” With added pressure from Sir John A. Macdonald, who wanted to keep the road entirely on Canadian soil, the majority of the company directors backed down. Hill soon resigned from the cpr board, sold his shares, and launched a paid smear campaign against the securities on American stock exchanges. “I’ll get Van Horne,” he vowed, “if I have to go to Hell for it and shovel coal.” Van Horne toured the north shore of Lake Superior and returned with a typical conclusion. “It’s two hundred miles of engineering impossibilities,” he reported. “But we’ll bridge it.” He decided to build the tracks near the shoreline, so that construction could be supplied by water. He imported Clyde-built steamers to plant caches of materials. To reduce haulage, he built factories in the bush that turned out three tons of dynamite a day. By the spring of 1884, nine thousand men were working in the soggy wilderness. One particularly bitter stretch of muskeg swallowed the track seven times, along with three locomotives. Between Sudbury and Cartier, a lake had to be lowered ten feet to get a foundation for track, and three miles of curved track were needed to go around Jackfish Bay, although the jump across was only half a mile. The mighty convulsions of nature were only one of Van Horne’s worries in 1884. cpr financing through the sale of common stock was lagging badly due to opposition lobbies and pressure from European financiers who had lost heavily on other railway ventures. Construction crews went for months without a pay car on the sidings. When creditors came to Van Horne, he almost always managed to postpone the bills. “Go sell your boots and buy cpr stock!” was his inevitable parting sally. In Parliament, Liberals charged that, for six months of the year, the railroad would be “an idle, ice-bound, snow-covered route.” Opposition leader Edward Blake predicted the mountain section “would not pay for the grease on the axles.” Van Horne was infuriated by newspaper criticism. “I think you are the damnedest – I was going to say the damnedest fool I have ever known,” Van Horne wrote one hostile editor, “but I can’t say that, because I have known two or three others who completed their record by dying in their foolishness, while

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The Nation Builder

your record is still incomplete, and there is a faint chance that you may yet make a turn and end under suspicion of having had some sense.” Van Horne attracted controversy. The cpr charter named Port Moody as the road’s western terminal. Dissatisfied with harbour facilities there, Van Horne chose instead a spot on Burrard Inlet. He named it Vancouver, after the British captain who landed there in 1792. There was loud agitation to have it called Granville, for Great Britain’s colonial secretary. “Hell,” declared Van Horne, “this isn’t going to be the kind of town you name after an absentee governor.” Early in 1885, word reached Ottawa that Louis Riel was again rallying the disenchanted Métis, who now hated the cpr as much as they had once despised the Hudson’s Bay Company. Van Horne reminded Sir John A. Macdonald that it had taken the government three months to get troops from Toronto to Fort Garry during the first revolt in 1870. “Put them under my direction for transport and supplies,” he told the prime minister, “and I pledge my word, and if necessary, my life to have them at Fort Qu’Appelle in ten days.” Forty-eight hours after Macdonald agreed to try the scheme, Van Horne’s trains began to load the first of more than three thousand troops from a dozen cities. At each end of steel, Van Horne packed the soldiers on freight sleds to cross the gaps. Trains were routed across frozen rivers on tracks laid only hours before. The portage operations halted twice a day for warm chicken or steak dinners, supplied by the company on Van Horne’s orders. The first contingent reached Winnipeg in seven days and Fort Qu’Appelle two days later. The army was still in the field when Macdonald agreed to grant the loan that financed the final stretch. “The biggest things are always the easiest to do,” Van Horne once said, “because there is no competition.” The last spike was driven into the cpr rail by Donald Smith at 9.22 a.m. on 7 November 1885, at Craigellachie, bc. Van Horne stood at Smith’s right elbow, unsmiling but obviously pleased (fig. 4.1). He had arrived in Canada forty-six months before. Behind him stretched twin ribbons of steel, 2,905 miles long. To show off his railway, Van Horne shortly afterwards bet a group of newspapermen he could run them the 840 miles from Winnipeg to the Rocky foothills between dawn and dusk. He made it, but to shorten the odds he chose to make the trip on 21 June, the longest day of the year. Completion of the main line meant that Van Horne could begin to shape the cpr into an integrated transportation network. Named to succeed Stephen as president on 7 August 1888, he immediately expanded the company’s

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Peter C. Newman

Figure 5.5 Telegram from William Van Horne to Prime Minister Macdonald, 7 November 1885. Library and Archives Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald fonds, e000009485.

colonization program and offered free homes in the West for teachers and doctors. To boost the quality of prairie grain, he built a million-bushel elevator at Fort William. When his critics claimed that the entire West would never grow enough wheat to fill it, he put the company into the wheat business. “Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll import the tourists,” he told his assistants, and he mapped out Canada’s first major tourist campaign. He put up and helped design a string of famous hotels, including the Château Frontenac at Quebec City and the Banff Springs in Alberta. He hired artists to paint the landscapes along the line. He wrote most of the company’s advertising slogans, producing such bizarre legends as “wise men of the east, go west on the c.p.r.,” and “by thunder (bay) passes the c.p.r.!” When he opened

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The Nation Builder

Figure 5.6 Opposite top A.H. Harris, Van Horne in His Office at the CPR, Montreal, Quebec, 1904. © McCord Museum, VIEW-6488.F.

Figure 5.7 Opposite bottom William Van Horne at the site of the new steel bridge over Stoney Creek in British Columbia, 1894. Exporail, Canadian Pacific Railway Company fonds, P170 – A_649_300ppp.

24

the new Windsor Station in Montreal, his ads proudly announced, “beats all creation, the new c.p.r. station!” “We are a great deal too quiet in Canada,” he declared. “We don’t puff ourselves up enough or make enough of our advantages and our doings. Why, we live next door to fifty millions of liars and we must brag or we shall be talked out.” Van Horne also internationalized the cpr’s operations by building a fleet of ocean liners. His Empress of India offered history’s first round-the-world cruises under the flag of a single company. He took time out to design the redand-white house flag of the cpr’s steamships, and drafted construction plans for thirty-thousand-passenger, tripled-hulled transatlantic ferries, complete with avenues, cafés, and theatres, but his directors turned down the scheme. Quickly bored with head-office routine, he ranged over the system, making drastic improvements on the spot. He was thought by many trainmen to have the powers of the devil himself. One time, as he was tramping up and down the Sudbury station platform, waiting for his train to start and bundled into his winter furs, he went unrecognized. As he passed the caboose, he overheard the brakeman boasting about the sleep he got on his run. When he reached Montreal, Van Horne discovered the negligent trainman’s name and dispatched a telegram to the train’s conductor: “go into the caboose and you will find john rogers asleep wake him and show him this telegram – van horne.” The frightened brakeman told and retold the story so effectively that cpr train crews from then on did their dozing off the job. Van Horne’s formidable memory contributed to his reputation for second sight. One evening at Government House in Ottawa, he met an English engineer who had just returned from Japan. After a few drinks, the Englishman casually told the guests that his wife, who was still in the Orient, had allowed a tattoo artist to imprint a life-size bluebottle on the upper part of her left arm. A year later, at a Montreal dinner, Van Horne was introduced to the engineer’s wife, and he immediately recalled the name and the tattoo story. Having heard about his reputation for mind-reading, she demanded, “Sir William, tell me, what am I thinking of?” After a prolonged pretence of reluctance, Van Horne agreed to perform the experiment. He asked that the lights be lowered, and looked at her in profound concentration. Then, with eyes closed, he intoned: “You are thinking of something alive … an insect, perhaps … you are thinking of the picture of a bluebottle tattooed on your arm.” He

Peter C. Newman

Figure 5.8 Artist unknown, The Van Horne, 1935, trimmed, nailed wooden box, Thomas Harkness & Sons, Ltd, factory 38 port 10-D, series C (1935). Canadian Museum of History, 2001, 185.40, S2002-6950.

poked his finger at the spot just as the brash young lady fainted. Van Horne would only shrug when the other guests demanded that he explain his feat. Another favourite practical joke was his cigar prank. A firm of cut-rate tobacconists had capitalized on his fame by calling a five-cent brand “The Van Horne” (fig. 5.8). He ordered hundreds of the leafy horrors, removed their bands, mixed them into his humidor with expensive Havanas, and then palmed them off on his guests. His visitors, wishing to acknowledge his reputation as a connoisseur, would inhale the tarry mixture, and exclaim: “Ah, Sir William, what a delightful aroma!” They could only smile icily at Van Horne’s crude guffaw that followed his explanation. He once hired a man simply because the fellow had butted one of the dud cigars and asked, “How much does the stable boy charge you for these things?” Van Horne was a good billiard shot, despite his girth, and a master chess player, but his favourite relaxation was poker – a pastime he referred to as “not a game, but an education.” On one journey from Winnipeg to Montreal, he could find no partners, so he commandeered the conductor – then promptly fired him at Fort William, because he had recently issued a warning that no employee was to engage in cards while on duty. When he returned to Montreal, however, he moved the disgraced man to a better job at head office. Such amusements provided Van Horne with only minor diversion. His serious interest in art occupied most of his spare time, but he also loved the symphonies of Beethoven and often read a book in a night. He had no patience with authors who analyzed the moral reasoning of their characters. “I want

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Peter C. Newman

something doing,” he said. “I don’t care a rap why people do things in novels or real life. Working out motives and lines of thought is about as useful as a signboard on Niagara Falls.” Van Horne’s main home was at 1139 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal, now the site of the Sofitel Hotel. A three-storey baronial mansion built like an armoury, its velvet wall hangings provided the mellow setting for the display of an impressive collection of British, European, American, and Canadian paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Hals, Velázquez, Turner, Constable, and Cézanne. The most attractive room was his study – half of an upstairs floor, crammed with antique ship models and one of the largest collections of Japanese pottery in North America. “Never buy a picture that you do not fall in love with,” he maintained. “The purchase of a picture, like the selection of a wife, can hardly be done by proxy.” When he was showing an admiring guest through his gallery, Van Horne would pause before a sombre landscape signed by Théodore Rousseau, the French artist of the Barbizon school. He would wait for his visitor to mouth the appropriate flattery on his taste in art, then declare with a slap of the visitor’s back that he had painted the canvas himself. His lack of technique marred many of his pictures, but his drawing was good – especially the anatomy of trees – and his sense of colour was professionally true. He once painted a canvas a day for three months, working until two or three o’clock in the morning. During his European tours, he would send postcards home with watercolour sketches of his activities (fig. 5.9). Many of his best paintings were completed in his studio on top of a specially erected outlook tower at “Covenhoven,” his sprawling summer home on Minister’s Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick (fig. 5.10). Its living room was so large that eight men were needed to lift the Indian rug he bought to cover the floor. The room’s twenty-foot granite fireplace was flanked by ornately carved Italian pillars, covered in gold leaf. The five-hundred-acre estate had its own vineyards and peach orchards. He raised acres of mushrooms and became an expert at identifying hundreds of varieties. He also owned a four-thousandacre farm near Selkirk, Manitoba, where he grew wheat and raised prize cattle. Van Horne preferred to deal with company matters in his cpr presidential office on the fifth floor of the Windsor Station. He faced his callers – no matter how eminent – straddling his armless chair backwards, as if on a saddle. He would rest his elbows on his stomach, which was propped against the chair’s stiff back. When he became excited, he would kick the chair over.

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Figure 5.9 Right William Van Horne, page from Letters from Grandpa to William Cornelius Covenhoven Van Horne, May 29, 1909, watercolour. Gift of the Matthew S. Hannon Family, 2011, LA.VHF.S17.1.31. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 5.10 Opposite Artist unknown, Sir William Van Horne’s Country House, St Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, copied 1926–27. © McCord Museum, VIEW23944.0.

His assistants learned to expect the unexpected. He once dictated a burning memorandum that any cpr engineer caught in a race with competing Canada Atlantic trains would be fired at once. Then he called his secretary back to add a footnote: “Any cpr engineer who allows a Canada Atlantic train to beat him shall also be liable for instant dismissal.” Van Horne became an ardent patriot. “To have built that road,” he said, “would have made a Canadian out of the German Emperor.” On a tour of Europe, he touted the glorious future of Canada as being certain as the sunrise. He startled many people on both sides of the border when he told a visiting US senator, “I am a Chinese Wall protectionist. I don’t mean merely in trade. I mean everything. I’d keep American ideas out of this country.”

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Peter C. Newman

Asked twice by Sir John A. Macdonald to accept a knighthood, Van Horne finally yielded in 1895. On the morning his appointment was announced, the Windsor Station doorman, who customarily greeted him with a friendly wave, bowed and said, “Good morning, Sir William.” Van Horne shouted “Oh hell!” at the startled fellow, and would see no one for the rest of the morning. He refused to accept any of the honorary university degrees offered him, because he believed degrees should be awarded for academic achievement only. Having got the cpr through the crippling depression of the 1890s, Van Horne decided to resign. Though his daily contacts with the company ended, Van Horne always championed the road, urging all his friends to buy its stock, even when it fell as low as $35. He predicted in 1899 that the company’s shares would hit $200 by 1910. Not only did they surpass that, they soared fifty points higher a year later. Conservative politicians urged him to stand for office, but Van Horne was not interested. “Nothing could induce me to go into politics,” he declared. “I would as soon think of becoming a parson.” Reluctantly, he agreed to take a holiday in California. He only got as far as Monterey. “I went out on the verandah, sat down, and smoked a big cigar,” he said later. “Then I got up, walked around, and looked at the scenery. It was very fine. I sat down again and smoked another cigar. Then I jumped up and telephoned for my car to be coupled to the next train, and by jinks, I was never so happy in my life as I was when I struck the cpr again.” Van Horne was rescued from his restlessness by American investors who asked him to take over electrification of Havana streetcars, at that time pulled

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Figure 5.11 Naranjo Foto, William Van Horne at His Estate Near Camagüey, Cuba, February 1910. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, a213804.

by mules. With his usual foresight, Van Horne quickly reached beyond the city’s problems. The sugar-rich eastern provinces could be reached only by water. Van Horne took a ten-day horseback journey through the interior and decided to span the island with a railroad. The line was completed 1 December 1902, reducing the crossing from a ten-day hardship to a one-day excursion. To bolster the road’s traffic, Van Horne converted an old government barracks at Camaguey into a modern hotel (fig. 5.11).

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“Work? I never work,” he once declared. “I haven’t worked since I was ten years old and split logs. I have only enjoyed.” When Van Horne died on 11 September 1915, three weeks after an unsuccessful abdominal operation, the entire cpr system was halted in silent homage for five minutes. Cuba declared a day of national mourning for the man who had done more for the country in a year, it was said, than Spain had done in four hundred and fifty years. His body was taken for burial to Joliet, Illinois, his ancestral home, by the “Saskatchewan,” the private coach in which he had so often travelled over his railroad. He loved to climb aboard at the very moment his train was scheduled to start, and would roar at the conductor if it was a minute early or late. The car was constructed entirely of mahogany, its interior panelling glowing dark red in the light of the brass lamps. The master compartment had a brass bedstead riveted to the floor. Shortly before his death, he summarized for a Montreal friend the simple philosophy that had guided his remarkable life. With typical Van Horne optimism, he expressed himself in the present tense: “I eat all I can, I drink all I can, I smoke all I can, and I don’t give a damn for anything.”

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Figure 6.1 Van Horne at his easel. William Brymner (1855–1925), Building the Stacks, pastel on board, 36 ! 26 cm. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Sir William Van Horne was one of the most striking

His curiosity and his power of acquiring knowl-

and picturesque figures among the great collec-

edge were as insatiable as his energy was restless

tors of America. A big, burly figure overflowing

and untiring. In his attitude to art these character-

with vitality, he took his chances in society as he

istics were apparent. His temperament and his

had taken them in the backwoods of Canada, with

past life had been too active to allow of any pro-

a genial and unpretentious simplicity of manner.

found or contemplative enjoyment of beauty.

He did not care to hide behind the entrenchments

Whatever his unusual faculties enabled him to

of etiquette and formality with which most of the

grasp in a rapid glance he enjoyed exuberantly,

newly rich protect their sensitiveness to criticism.

but beyond that he never cared to penetrate, too

On his frequent visits to New York he would put

many other curious and odd interests being at

up at one of the big hotels. There he was entirely

hand to solicit his attention. I believe his knowl-

accessible to anyone who would spend long nights

edge of Japanese pottery was remarkable, but I

in the saloon over innumerable tankards of Ger-

think what attracted him most was the possibilities

man beer discussing Japanese pottery, the ideal

of connoisseurship which this study afforded him.

planning of cities, Chinese scripts, Dutch painting,

He used at one time to offer to tell the maker of a

cattle breeding and bacon curing, or who would

piece without seeing it, by feeling it with his hands

listen to his racy descriptions of his adventures in

held behind his back, on condition that if he was

planning the Canadian Pacific Railway.

right the piece should be his, and if wrong he

At his home in Montreal his guests would spend

should pay a forfeit; but, according to his own ac-

the day looking at his vast and varied collections

count, he was so frequently right that the Japan-

of old masters and of Japanese pottery. In the

ese collectors with whom he played the game,

evening discussions on some of his so diverse

finally fought shy of the ordeal.

hobbies would go on till well into the early hours, and it was currently believed that when all his

Roger Fry, noted British art critic

comparatively youthful guests had at last dropped

Excerpt from the obituary of Sir William Van Horne,

off to bed, Sir William retired to an immense attic

The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 28, no. 151

fitted up as a studio, and there by the aid of an

(October 1915–March 1916): 39–40.

intense arc light would begin to paint one of the ten-foot canvases of Western Canadian scenery which filled up any gaps in his walls as yet uncovered by old masters.

Janet M. Brooke

Van Horne and Friends Collecting European Art in Montreal s Square Mile

Today’s visitors to Montreal – comfortably shod and undaunted by the prospect of a steep climb up the slope of Mount Royal – might be tempted to explore the city’s legendary Square Mile, bordered by Pine Avenue and RenéLévesque Boulevard to the north and south, and Park Avenue and Guy Street to the east and west. They might be drawn especially to Sherbrooke Street, bisecting its centre, hoping to admire the Gilded Age mansions gracing that once elm-lined thoroughfare, renowned in their day for their grand exteriors and opulent interiors. Sadly, they would be largely disappointed. Little remains of the architecture that housed the families of many of Canada’s most-fortuned citizens in what was then its largest metropolis: a mere handful, long since sold by their heirs, survived the wrecking ball, and the immense wealth of their proud occupants – captains of industry in an emerging nation – is for the most part scattered.1 Absque argento omnia vana. In its heyday, from around 1880 to the end of World War I, Montreal rivalled other major North American commercial centres – New York, Boston, and Chicago – its business leaders amassing fortunes in transportation, banking, utilities, and commodities. Much of their success hinged on the completion in 1885 of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s transcontinental line, stretching from Montreal to Vancouver and allowing efficient movement of goods across the nation and beyond the seas from ports east and west.2 The oft-told “last spike” story of that ambitious enterprise has attained mythic stature in the annals of Canadian popular history.3 Its principal architect, as is well known, was Sir

William Van Horne (1843–1915), typically described as a kind of colossus in girth, energy, and ambition, dwarfing all who stood in his shadow: a self-made renegade who succeeded where others failed, through sheer dint of effort and talent (fig. 5.2). As with all such narratives, the truth is more nuanced. Van Horne succeeded spectacularly, but he did not succeed singlehandedly or uniquely. The business, political, and personal networks he cultivated before, during, and after his cpr years arguably paint just as interesting a picture as the version in which he stands alone, a giant among men. So it is too with Van Horne’s impressive art-collecting ambitions and accomplishments. Passing references to them pepper the oft-repeated account of Van Horne’s rise from humble beginnings to business legend, invariably limited to the naming of some of the renowned artists represented in his holdings: Rembrandt, Monet, and so on. Some mention his passion for Asian ceramics – the subject of this exhibition – and his purported skill in identifying glazes and makers. Until now, few have examined the full natures and scope these collections, nor have the contexts in which he built them been explored, the better to understand their place in the history of North American collecting in the Gilded Age. Even fewer name those among his Square Mile neighbours who, like him, collected seriously.4 This overview explores both the landscape of Montreal’s Square Mile in its halcyon days and its principal collectors, who amassed notable holdings of European paintings befitting the lofty social and economic stations they had attained.5

••• Like other self-made Gilded Age tycoons, Van Horne came to collecting as his fortunes began their climb, but unlike most, he seems to have been a born collector. As a boy at the family’s home in Joliet, Illinois, he began gathering and cataloguing fossils he discovered locally, and even at this early age showed the single-mindedness that would drive his later successes. He studied the subject assiduously, and eventually amassed a museum-worthy collection that now resides at Chicago’s Field Museum.6 As a talented draughtsman, perhaps it is natural that he would eventually fix more than most upon the fine arts, in an era when collecting became a means by which the urban elite put its wealth on display. In the years leading up to the completion of the cpr line, Van Horne had led a peripatetic existence, spending much of his time along its route to oversee progress, first from Winnipeg and then from Montreal, where he purchased a home on Dorchester Street in 1882.7 Once settled, in his mid-forties,

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with his family into the grand Sherbrooke Street mansion he bought in 1890 and soon extended – notoriously demolished in 1973 (see figs. 3.3 and 3.4) – he began collecting in earnest; his earliest acquisitions – Barbizon School and Realist French paintings – date to the late 1880s. Van Horne was an inveterate note-taker and record-keeper; the survival of family papers related to his collecting activities opens a window onto their evolution and breadth, and helps parse the ever-widening international network of art dealers, specialists, and collecting colleagues he cultivated.8 American by birth – and arguably by temperament and taste – he collected with an entrepreneurial bent that sets his practices apart from those of his Square Mile peers, mostly enterprising immigrants from Scotland. Thus, Van Horne eschewed Academic and Hague School painting at a time when both held great sway with other Montreal collectors, and was among the first generation of North American buyers of Impressionist paintings, in the early 1890s.9 Uniquely, he later acquired several significant PostImpressionist works, including two pictures by Cézanne, among the first to cross the Atlantic10 (fig. 7.1). As noteworthy as those acquisitions are in retrospect, they were relatively inexpensive, even experimental, purchases at the time, of works by artists whose values were yet untested in the marketplace.11 By the end of his life, Van Horne’s collection of European paintings totalled some three hundred works, by far the largest in Canada, and one of the ranking private art collections in North America.12 His heaviest financial commitments were in Old Masters, with prime examples acquired from the leading New York, Paris, and London dealers of the day: Knoedler, Durand-Ruel, Colnaghi, Agnew, and so on. Unlike his fellow Square Milers, he rarely purchased at auction, preferring the relative security afforded him by cultivating relationships with dealers, from whom he could take pictures on approval and return them if dissatisfied (an option he exercised fairly often). The strategy also allowed him the time to correspond with specialists to confirm the attribution and significance of works under consideration, and the chance to “trade up” when better examples were forthcoming.13 Unique among his Square Mile neighbours, but aligned to the tastes of New York collectors Henry Clay Frick and Archer Huntington, Van Horne invested in the emerging market for Spanish painting.14 He acquired multiple works by (or attributed to) El Greco and Goya; his spectacular Zurbarán, Saint Casilda, proudly greeted visitors in his reception hall15 (figs. 7.2 and 7.3).

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Janet M. Brooke

Figure 7.1 Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Portrait of Madame Cézanne, ca 1885, oil on canvas, 46 ! 38 cm. Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. bpk-Bildagentur. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Art Resource, New York.

More typically, he sought out eighteenth-century English portraits, including an extremely fine Romney (fig. 7.4). Conversely, he dabbled only infrequently in Italian and Northern Renaissance art – explicitly biblical subject matter held little interest for him – and the few works he did purchase were often exchanged within a few years, or returned to their dealers.16 His two greatest passions were for seventeenth-century Dutch masters and for the French Romantics, Naturalists, and Realists of the nineteenth century. These were, of course, schools of painting prized by collectors of his day, but it is tempting to speculate on the special appeal that such landscapes and still lifes might have held for the unapologetically practical and irreligious Van Horne, who was likely particularly seduced by their sensual tactility, inspiration from nature, and attachment to the here-and-now.17

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Van Horne and Friends

Figure 7.2 Right Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), Saint Casilda, ca 1635, oil on canvas, 171 ! 107 cm. Museo ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid, inv. no. 1979.26. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Figure 7.3 Opposite Wm. Notman & Son, Reception Hall, Sir William Van Horne Residence, Montreal, 1920. © McCord Museum, Montreal, VIEW-19337.

Such pictures drew Van Horne from the start. By 1892, when he recorded a number of acquisitions in a notebook, he already owned works by Delacroix, Rousseau, and Daumier.18 These artists continued to interest him over the years, and their works took pride of place in his home (see fig. 9.12), but as his fortunes and confidence grew, he looked increasingly toward the Old Masters, and especially to works from the Dutch Golden Age. One of his earlier pur-

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chases had been a “Rembrandt” portrait in 1896, a work that he soon realized was misattributed.19 Another early purchase, in 1893, was the lovely Frans Hals, Portrait of Samuel Ampzing, a rare small work on copper (fig. 7.5). By the new century, and especially following the lifting of import duties on Old Masters into the United States in 1909 – which further fuelled an already heated North American market – Van Horne was competing with the best for first-rate Dutch painting. Among his most spectacular purchases that year was Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Jew, formerly in the famed Rodolphe Kann collection, Paris (fig. 7.6). His holdings in this area were sufficiently reputed to garner an invitation in 1909 to lend works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of Dutch painting, the first “blockbuster” exhibition of Dutch art in North America.20

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Van Horne and Friends

Figure 7.4 George Romney (1734–1802), Portrait of Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, with Her Son George Duncan, Marquess of Huntly, 1778, oil on canvas, 126.5 ! 102.5 cm. National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh, purchased 1972 with help from the Pilgrim Trust, inv. no. PG 2208.

Figure 7.5 Opposite left Frans Hals (1582/3–1666), Portrait of Samuel Ampzing, ca 1630, oil on copper, 16.4 ! 12.4 cm. Image courtesy of The Leiden Collection, New York, inv. no. FH-100.

Figure 7.6 Opposite right Rembrandt van Rijn (1606– 1669), Portrait of a Young Jew, 1663, oil on canvas, 65.8 ! 57.5 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, inv. no. AP 1977.04. Art Resource, New York.

40

Readers will have noticed in the figure captions for these purchases that they are now in museums worldwide. Van Horne’s daughter, Adaline (1868–1941), bequeathed her share of the collection, including fifty European paintings, to the Art Association of Montreal (today’s Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). Over a dozen were deaccessioned by the institution in the following decade; of those that remain, many count among the glories of the museum’s European holdings.21 The story of the afterlife of the estate’s remaining and far larger share, through auctions and private sales, is exceedingly complex and cannot be told here.22 Suffice it to say that the systematic erosion, and ultimately the disappearance, of the physical integrity of the Van Horne collection, starting

Janet M. Brooke

in 1946, should be keenly felt among those interested in Canadian cultural history. And the story is not unique. Among the collections here discussed, two others – those of Sir George Alexander Drummond (1829–1910) and James Ross (1848–1913) – were also dispersed, and are largely lost to Montreal.

••• Drummond’s baronial sandstone residence, which once stood on the southeast corner of Sherbrooke and Metcalfe streets, was even grander than Van Horne’s, a few blocks away on the northeast corner of Stanley Street (fig. 7.7). Designed by his nephew, the Edinburgh-born architect Andrew Taylor, and completed in 1889, it gave physical expression to Drummond’s ever-growing status as a Canadian business and political leader.23 As a senator, founder of the Canada Sugar Refining Company, and director of the Bank of Montreal, Drummond frequented the same circles as Van Horne; as a collector, he was no less successful, and just as bold as his younger, American-born colleague. Unlike Van Horne, who rose from poverty, the Edinburgh-born Drummond was well born and well educated, and came to Montreal already well-connected.

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Van Horne and Friends

Figure 7.7 Wm. Notman & Son, Sir George A. Drummond Residence, Sherbrooke Street, Montreal, ca 1900. © McCord Museum, Montreal, VIEW-3260.0.

Related by marriage to the Montreal sugar magnate John Redpath, he joined the firm on his arrival in the city in the 1850s. From there he went from strength to strength. Since he was by all accounts quiet and measured, one might expect his collecting practices to err on the conservative side, and while it is true that his early purchases were just that, his tastes seem to have broadened rapidly.24 By 1879, Drummond’s was the only Square Mile collection sufficiently formed to be included in the first influential book-length record of American Gilded Age holdings, The Art Treasures of America, published that year.25 There, the list of his paintings – modest by modern standards – includes French and German Academic works, as well as the inevitable Corots and Hague School pictures. He would continue to prize Academic paintings throughout his collecting career, acquiring, for example, two Salon canvases by the French Orientalist painter Benjamin-Constant.26 By the early 1890s, Drummond also counted important Old Master pictures among his holdings, including a fine de Hooch (fig. 7.8). His most significant – and unexpected – collecting accomplishments were in avant-garde French art. It was Drummond, not Van Horne, who made the first Square Mile foray into Impressionism, and conceivably it was his example that

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spurred Van Horne in that direction. Drummond bought Raffaëlli’s Figures and Donkey from the Paris dealer Boussod Valadon & Cie in summer 1889. It was the first Impressionist painting to enter a Canadian collection, and among the earliest in North America.27 Two years later, in December 1891 and from the same dealer, he acquired a Monet landscape, a Whistler genre subject, and a remarkable Degas: Henri Michel-Lévy in His Studio.28 At the same time, he purchased a marble carving of Rodin’s Sirens, a bold move, given that North American collectors had yet to embrace the sculptor’s erotic compositions. It was the first of its kind to enter a collection on this side of the Atlantic.29 Like thousands of others in Canada of all social classes, Drummond’s family paid the ultimate price in World War I. His son Guy Melfort fell at Ypres in 1915. The collector himself had died five years earlier, and the

Figure 7.8 Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684), A Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy, ca 1660–1663, oil on canvas, 68.6 ! 53.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, purchase, inv. no. 84.PA.47.

collection of some two hundred paintings was liquidated en bloc at Christie’s in London, on 26 June 1919, with the proceeds divided among his many heirs. The auction, which garnered several record prices, spelled an end to the Drummond collection, with an important exception: thirteen works were bought back by the family (the bidder acting on its behalf was none other than Andrew Taylor); several were donated to the Art Association of Montreal. Van Horne’s collecting appetite was gargantuan; Drummond’s somewhat less so. The collection of James Ross, numbering around forty European paintings, was not of ambitious scale, but its quality was high. No family papers have survived to elucidate his thinking or methods, but the provenances of his pictures demonstrate that he bought with deliberation, from London’s top picture dealers and at major auctions. Like Drummond, Ross was well educated in Scotland (as a civil engineer), and like Van Horne, made his money primarily as a railway man, first in the United States and then in Canada. At the cpr, he was Van Horne’s chief engineer, responsible for the daunting logistics of pushing the line through unforgiving terrain. After settling in Montreal in 1888, he expanded his already considerable assets with investments in infrastructure projects in Canada and South America. Ross’s home, sited grandly on a broad, sloped lawn on Peel Street above Doctor Penfield (formerly McGregor) Avenue, is the only surviving mansion among those of Montreal’s principal collectors: sold and donated to McGill University in 1928, it now houses the university’s Faculty of Law (fig. 7.9). Designed in 1892 by American architect Bruce Price (builder of the cpr’s luxury hotels and of Windsor Station), Ross’s was the only Square Mile residence to boast a dedicated, top-lit picture gallery, mirroring the practice of American and British collectors for such formal showcases (fig. 7.10). A lone photograph survives of it, installed with Ross’s Old Master paintings, including works by Turner, Cuyp, and Reynolds, and featuring a fine Rembrandt on the far wall, Portrait of a Man in a Fur-lined Coat (fig. 7.11). Ross died a very wealthy man, but his fortune soon evaporated: his son, an avid yachtsman, sportsman, philanthropist, and gambler, declared bankruptcy fifteen years later. He was not alone: other great Square Mile families suffered this fate, to some degree or another, at the very least through distribution among numerous, less-entrepreneurial heirs. More broadly, the toll of war, the introduction of personal income tax in 1918, the Crash of 1929: all played a role in the later histories of Montreal’s elite. Twenty-nine European paintings from the Ross collection went on the auction block in 1927.30 In the absence

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Figure 7.9 Top Wm. Notman & Son, James Ross Residence, Peel Street, Montreal, ca 1910. © McCord Museum, Montreal, VIEW-8715.

Figure 7.10 Bottom Wm. Notman & Son, Picture Gallery, James Ross Residence, Peel Street, Montreal, 1901. © McCord Museum, Montreal, II-137813.

Figure 7.11 Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Portrait of a Man in a Fur-lined Coat, ca 1655–1660, oil on canvas, 114.9 ! 88.3 cm. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, Clarence Brown Fund, inv. no. 1977.50.

of a family archive, that auction catalogue, as well as the catalogue of a 1915 exhibition of part of the collection at the Art Association of Montreal, are the only two sources that document the stature, if not the entirety, of a collection that vied with the Square Mile’s best.31 The collection of Richard B. Angus (1831–1922), which weathered such storms better than most, deserves more mention than it has received. An influential banker and member of the cpr syndicate, Angus and his growing family had lived modestly in Chicago, New York, and Montreal. By 1884 – fortune made – they moved into an enormous three-storey home on Drummond Street between Doctor Penfield Avenue and Sherbrooke Street.32 Like Ross, Angus collected on a small scale and well, if rather conservatively, beginning with French Academic and Hague School pictures. He had certainly begun collecting by the late 1870s, and by 1903, when he produced a bound typescript catalogue of his paintings collection, his holdings had grown to include a

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representative selection of major nineteenth-century French artists, bought from leading Scottish and French dealers, including significant examples by Daumier, Courbet, and Delacroix.33 Whether by choice or cost, Old Master paintings held limited interest for Angus, although he did own a fine Rembrandt portrait. While a certain number of these works re-entered the market decades later, many have remained in Montreal, starting with donations in 1889 by Angus himself to the Art Association of Montreal, and followed by numerous additional gifts and bequests from his descendants – including the Rembrandt, the sole painting in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts by that artist. Like Van Horne’s, the trajectory of Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal (1820–1914) – from humble clerk in the northern outposts of the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada’s highest echelons – is a novel-worthy case of upward mobility. A gifted negotiator, politician, and financier, he was (among his many other ventures) at the core of the cpr’s operations from the start, and enriched himself greatly by his efforts. It was Strathcona who ceremoniously drove the cpr’s last spike at Craigellachie, bc, on 7 November 1885, a testament to the role he had played in ensuring the project’s progress through its many financial and political crises. His enormous wealth was matched by an unparalleled philanthropic bent: through his gifts and bequests, some $7,500,000 (about $180,000,000 in today’s money) went to universities and hospitals in Montreal, and throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. Strathcona moved from Winnipeg to Montreal in the 1880s, purchasing and enlarging a lavish property on Dorchester Street (now René-Lévesque Boulevard; demolished in 1941, fig. 9.2). To furnish it, he purchased conservatively and often in bulk, usually at auction. He seemed little interested in collecting per se; rather he bought to stage domestic spaces suitable to his high social rank. The theatrical results can be seen in a handful of photographs taken of the interior: rows of paintings and bric-a-brac, perplexing even by the Victorian tastes of the day (figs. 7.12 and 9.4). Nonetheless, the collection had its treasures. It remained mostly intact following Strathcona’s death, and a substantial portion of it was donated to the Art Association of Montreal by his descendants in 1927. His large Academic paintings – such as the Tissot and Lefebvre seen in the photograph – were subsequently relegated to the museum’s vaults, their ilk having fallen out of taste (fig. 7.12). Subsequently restored, they are now among the centrepieces of the museum’s collection of nineteenth-century French art.34

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Figure 7.12 Wm. Notman & Son, Interior, Lord Strathcona’s Residence, Dorchester Street, Montreal, 1916. © McCord Museum, Montreal, VIEW-16062.

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Montreal’s collecting community was well known in Canada and beyond. Foreign dealers, scholars, and collectors included the city in their itineraries through North America, bringing new works to Montreal and disseminating its reputation as an art centre beyond our borders.35 The collectors themselves kept tabs on each other’s progress, if nothing else in the spirit of friendly competition.36 News of the arrival of distinguished art lovers to the city was communicated; invitations were shared.37 Van Horne, an accomplished amateur painter, extended his hospitality beyond that tight circle, regularly welcoming Canadian artists who expressed interest in his collection, thereby providing them access to examples of European painting. In several known instances, Montreal’s collectors visited New York and London dealers and exhibitions together, and encouraged one another to lend to exhibitions outside their hometown. Van Horne owned at least two paintings given to him by his Square Mile neighbours: Canaletto’s Interior of San Marco, Venice (from Angus) and

Janet M. Brooke

Ribot’s A Young Vendean (from Ross). Additional gifts to Van Horne came from American friends, and there likely were other similar exchanges within this tightly-knit group.38 As remarkable as Montreal’s Gilded Age collections are individually, together they represent far more: a shared patrimony that helped shape the city’s visual culture. Collecting is by nature an intensely private endeavour, yet inevitably it holds the promise of a more public dimension. In Montreal, that dimension was assured by the presence in the Square Mile of the Art Association of Montreal – first on Phillips Square and from 1912 on Sherbrooke Street – which from the 1870s onwards staged annual exhibitions drawn from Montreal’s private collections. Through these lenders (who were also the institution’s leaders and patrons), visitors from all ranks gained access to paintings by Europe’s greatest artists – the Dutch, English, and Spanish Old Masters, recent and contemporary French art – that they otherwise would never have known first-hand. As the Gilded Age waned, and during the decades that followed, the relationship between such privately acquired works of art and the public sphere would be further cemented by donations and bequests to an evergrowing permanent collection. We can rightly mourn the absence of the many paintings that left Canada forever, but we can console ourselves with those that remained: witnesses to a generation of great collectors, whose efforts indelibly contributed to Montreal’s cultural identity and its place in the art world.

n ote s 1 The neighbourhood is often called the “Golden Square Mile,” conflating the name with that of the Golden Mile in New York’s Upper East Side along Fifth Avenue. Montreal’s moniker likely comes from the similarly named section of London, that city’s centre of wealth. For a well-illustrated overview of the Square Mile’s architectural heritage, see MacKay, The Square Mile. 2 For a scholarly overview of the city’s economic and physical growth following the completion of the line, see Gournay and Vanlaethem, Montreal Metropolis, 1880–1930. 3 Primary among these are Berton, The Last Spike, a bestseller, and Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan. Van Horne’s family commissioned an earlier biography from Kathleen Hughes, who had collaborated with Van Horne towards an autobiography; the manuscript was reworked and published by another author in 1920: Vaughan, The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne. 4 In 1989, the author published a scholarly catalogue devoted to Montreal collectors’ acquisitions of nineteenth-century European paintings: Brooke, Discerning Tastes. There, she

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5

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

50

documented almost fourteen hundred such paintings collected by some one hundred Montrealers during this period. For additional general information on Van Horne and the other collectors discussed in this essay, see 11–30. She is currently reconstructing the entirety of the Van Horne collection of European paintings in a book-length study. This research was supported in 2016 by the Fellowship Program at the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and Art Reference Library, New York. Van Horne also built collections of Asian furniture and Islamic decorative arts, consistent with the tastes of the day. His collection of antique ship models was reportedly of some importance. These collections remain to be studied. His interest in Canadian art, while often mentioned in connection to his marketing policy of offering free cpr passes to painters to document scenery along the rail route, is far from fully explored. The collection was donated to the Walker Museum, University of Chicago; the holdings of that museum were later transferred to the Field Museum. Today, the duplex mansion is called Shaughnessy House (after a subsequent owner), and is home to the Canadian Centre for Architecture. For the building’s history, including the chains of ownership of its two residences, see Robert A. Lemire, “Maison Shaughnessy: histoire de l’îlot et de la maison,” typescript (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1982). The papers, donated in 2000 and 2011, are housed at the E.P. Taylor Research Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Van Horne Family Fonds, ca otag sc065 (hereafter vhff). Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 90–1, 134–7, 141–5. Montreal’s early collecting of Impressionist paintings is also surveyed in Prakash, Impressionism in Canada, 173–215. For Montreal collectors’ taste for Hague School painting, see Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 112–24, 164–5; Hurdalek, The Hague School, 13–17; and De Leeuw, Sillevis, and Dumas, De Haagse School, 128–9. Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 61–3. For example, Cézanne’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne cost $7,000 in 1912 (about $168,000 today). He purchased it from the Paris dealer Stephan Bourgeois, recently established in New York (vhff 4-21). By way of comparison, in 1910 Van Horne paid $32,500 ($795,000 today) for his large Romney (fig. 7.4 vhff 12-1, 176), and about $80,000 in 1909 ($2,032,000 today) for Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Jew (fig. 7.6 vhff 12-1, 126). The collection was cited often in the international press and in art periodicals, and was the subject of several monographic articles; for example: Waldmann, “Modern French Pictures”; Irwin, “Famous Pictures in Montreal”; Ranger, “Notes on Private Picture Collections in Montreal”; Conway, “Sir William Van Horne’s Collection at Montreal”; Von Loga, “The Spanish Pictures of Sir William Van Horne’s Collection”; Mayer, “Die Sammlung Sir William Van Horne in Montreal.” Towards the end of his life, Van Horne was invited to serve on the consultative committee of The Burlington Magazine, the world’s leading English-language scholarly art periodical. That journal published a lengthy obituary, penned by Roger Fry, “Notes [Sir William Van Horne],” 39–40. The vhff includes numerous letters from the ranking Dutch painting specialists Wilhelm von Bode, Abraham Bredius, and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, as well as from the Spanish art specialists Wilhelm Valentiner and August L. Mayer, and the Italian Renaissance expert

Janet M. Brooke

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

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Bernard Berenson. Most of them also visited Van Horne’s collection in situ. His acquisition of a sixteenth-century portrait by Giovanni Battista Moroni is one case in point: he hesitated for some months over the purchase, from the Paris dealer Kleinberger, eventually agreeing on the promise of receiving an authoritative authentication: “I am very much pleased at what Dr. Bode says about the Moroni ... I shall be greatly obliged if you will send me the photograph with his endorsement by mail. In these days of expertism and doubt it is sometimes useful to have such strong evidence” (Van Horne to Kleinberger, 11 June 1910, vhff 3-13). He returned two paintings acquired earlier from the dealer, in part payment. Like other collectors, Van Horne was unaware that connoisseurs were often quietly compensated by dealers for their authentications. Berenson had been approached earlier, but he declined, having not seen the painting (Samuels, Bernard Berenson, 103). The portrait, in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1945.904), and much damaged by clumsy restorations, is currently attributed to Moroni’s contemporary, Bartolomeo Passerotti. On early American taste for Spanish paintings see: Reist and Colomer, Collecting Spanish Art (on Van Horne see 32–3). Von Loga, “The Spanish Pictures of Sir William Van Horne’s Collection” provides an overview of Van Horne’s holdings in that area. Purchased from the New York dealer Louis R. Ehrich in 1906, for $15,000 (vhff 12-1; about $381,000 today). According to a letter to Van Horne from the dealer, dated 14 February 1906, the British art critic Roger Fry, then director of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, attempted to scoop the picture for his museum as negotiations with Van Horne were under way (vhff 4-3). Bernard Berenson, who had met Van Horne in New York in 1903, asked to visit the collection in January 1914 (vhff 7-14). It was not a success: Van Horne was laid up in bed with rheumatism, and Berenson, disappointed by the modest number of Italian pictures, was churlish in his comments (Samuels, Bernard Berenson, 170). The stylistic lineage among these schools of painting was not lost on Van Horne, who, boasting to the Boston dealer Charles Walker about his latest acquisition of a Daumier, wrote: “You may be interested in knowing that I have recently added an extraordinary Daumier, bringing my group of Daumiers to half a dozen. This last one has the qualities of a very fine Rembrandt” (Van Horne to Walker, 30 March 1914, vhff 2-2). The notebook is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Archives, William Cornelius Van Horne Fonds P40. See also Brooke Discerning Tastes, 20–1. Later notebooks (vhff 12-1, 13-7) help parse the evolution of the collection during the following two decades. Van Horne acquired it as Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Daughter of Jan Pellicorne; in 1909, confirming Van Horne’s growing doubts, Hofstede de Groot re-attributed it to Rembrandt’s contemporary Jacob Adriaensz Backer. It was deaccessioned in 1953 by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it had been bequeathed by Adaline Van Horne in 1945, and was last seen on the art market in 1997, under the title Girl in a Riding Habit. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Old Dutch Masters, Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Connection with the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, September–November 1909. Van Horne lent landscapes by Aelbert Cuyp and Philips Koninck, as well as Hals’s Portrait of Samuel Ampzing (fig. 7.5). He rescinded his agreement

Van Horne and Friends

21

22

23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34

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to also lend a recently acquired Rembrandt panel, Landscape with Cottages, deciding it was too fragile to travel. Fellow Square Miler James Ross was also a lender, sending his Rembrandt Portrait of a Man in a Fur-lined Coat (fig. 7.11). For example, Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting the Portrait of Campaspe (inv. 1945.929); Sisley’s Autumn: Banks of the Seine Near Bougival (inv. 1945.924); and Ruisdael’s The Bleaching Grounds Near Haarlem (inv. 1945.920). The afterlife of the collection is briefly described in Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 23; additional documentation has since come to light that demonstrates an even greater complexity to its subsequent history; it is currently being analyzed by the author. The house was demolished in 1926. Sadly, no photographs of its interior have come down to us. It is described in detail in: Wagg, The Architecture of Andrew Thomas Taylor, 46–55. The evolution of Drummond’s collection from its beginnings to its final composition can be reconstituted through family papers discovered by the author in 1987 and now housed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Archives, George A. Drummond Fonds P19. Strahan, The Art Treasures of America, 2: 63–6. Brooke, “For Fame and Fortune,” 320. Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 141–2, where its inclusion in the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, 1881, lent by the Paris collector and art critic Albert Wolff (no. 95), is first suggested. That information is now confirmed. The painting was last seen on the art market in 1989. Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 135, 166–7, 90–1 respectively. For the bill of sale, dated 31 December 1891, see George A. Drummond Fonds P19. Brooke, “Rodin et le Canada,” 154, 228–32. The Rodin is now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, donated by Drummond’s descendants (inv. 1958.1192). London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 8 July 1927. According to press reports, the sale proceeded with record speed, and several lots achieved top prices, in all totalling £136,000. Many of London’s top picture dealers were among the bidders. Montreal, Art Association of Montreal, The Ross Loan Collection of Paintings, etc., May 1915. The history of the house, demolished in 1960, is fully documented in Lesser, “The Homes, Furnishing and Collections of R.B. Angus,” 177–89. The typescript, which was revised in 1921 with manuscript references to Angus’s later acquisitions and subsequent sales, was in the collection of Fred Angus, Montreal, in 1989. Its current location is unknown to the author, who has a photocopy in her research files. On the three paintings cited, see Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 73–4, 85, 94–5. Strathcona took several of his most prized pictures with him to London following his appointment as Canadian High Commissioner to Britain in 1896, where he remained until his death. His great Turner, Mercury and Argus, returned to Canada in 1951, when purchased from the family by the National Gallery of Canada (inv. 5795). His Jules Breton, Les communiantes, purchased in New York for the then-record sum of $45,500 in 1886 ($1,112,000 today), was sold by the family in 1988 and acquired by another Canadian collector, Joey Tanenbaum. It was last seen on the auction market in 2016. See Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 58–60, 155–9.

Janet M. Brooke

35 Published accounts of European dealers’ relationships to Montreal collectors include Heijbroek and Wouthuysen, Portret van een Kunsthandel and Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin. Locally, the dealer Scott & Sons formed fluid partnerships with French and British dealers, through which offerings from their inventories were shipped for sale through the Montreal gallery. 36 For example, in 1890 Drummond wrote Van Horne to invite him to drop by and see his recently purchased Daubigny, Moonrise at Auvers (The Return of the Flock), now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (inv. 1919.36). See Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 81. Van Horne’s own Landscape with Sheepfold (Brooke, Discerning Tastes, 186, no. 294), in the collection by 1892, was of similar composition and unusual scale, suggesting that either Drummond or Van Horne was responding to the other’s acquisition. 37 Brooke, “For Fame and Fortune,” 319–20, documents one such example. 38 The Canaletto and Ribot gifts are recorded in vhff 6-1, 12-1, and 13-7. Both paintings are now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (invs. 1945.871 and 1945.914).

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Figure 8.1 Artist unknown, William Van Horne Seated on the Verandah of Covenhoven, St Andrews, New Brunswick, ca 1914–15. Library and Archives Canada, e007914039.

He was at his best when in his own house and if he

has now been lost though his note books contain a

could be induced to reminisce would talk for

great deal of exceptional value. By these methods,

hours. About midnight, weather permitting, he

Sir William developed his senses to an unusual

was fond of a stroll and was always accompanied

degree and this was most marked in his sense of

by one or more of his collies. The route was gener-

touch. The stories about his ability to identify the

ally the same – along Sherbrooke to Guy, down

Province in which a piece of Japanese pottery was

to Dorchester and home by Peel Street. On these

made – by touch alone – are literally true.

walks he would continue his narrative, often stop-

Had he lived, his catalogues would have been

ping with a laugh, to sidetrack to a joke regarding

unique as he was engaged in revising his notes,

some character in his story. He would then be

photographs, etc. personally. But the center of in-

extraordinarily pithy, at times conveying a whole

terest lay in his catalogue of Japanese Pottery, for

sentence by a word … Of course, his outstanding

he had made watercolours drawings of many of

passion was unquestionably the building up of

his important pieces. These were done with ex-

a collection of works of art, and it was here he

traordinary rapidity and with an eye for essentials

showed himself at his best. A keen student, always

alone. He had grasped the old Japanese adage

ready to learn from others, always ready to impart

“Suggest rather than depict.”

from his own great store of knowledge. Not content with one view-point alone – going to history,

F. Cleveland Morgan, businessman, collector, and friend

to chemistry, to anything that would help him to

of Sir William Van Horne

better understand the “raison d’être” of his trea-

Excerpt from the obituary of Sir William Van Horne,

sures. He was not interested in pictures and pot-

McGill University Magazine, February 1916

tery as dry collections of so many examples but as living expressions of the people who made them. He did not indulge in higher criticism or attempt to define his own emotions in public, but he took the same quality of pleasure in the subtle beauties of a Japanese tea bowl as in the more obvious attractions of a painting by Velásquez. There was nothing selfish in his collecting, and he gave most practical encouragement to others, once he felt their interest genuine … Much of this knowledge

Laura Vigo

Japan Contained The Birth of the Asian Collections at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Social and cultural power in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century was centred in the hands of English-speaking “merchant princes,” imperial capitalists of mostly Scottish, Protestant origin, connected to the expansion of the railway system and the shaping of Canada as a nation.1 If their private and public worlds were intertwined, they were also surprisingly narrow. Their unprecedented wealth, combined with language and cultural barriers, cut them off from the middle stratum of bourgeois families in the city, as well as from the working classes, the majority of whom were French-speaking. Their social homogeneity, common culture, and sense of entitlement contributed not only to the design and construction of many of Montreal’s architectural landmarks within the Golden Square Mile, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa), but also to the creation of expansive art collections, ranging from European and Canadian to Asian, some of which are now in the museum they helped create.2 These eclectic collections were not only a material projection of their owners’ wealth and prestige, but a sign of their association with the British Empire and its specific mode of collecting. Colonial conquest and its ideology within Montreal’s elite were reflected in the Eurocentric focus of their collections, and their first interest in Orientalist painting.3 Their speculative gaze soon turned to China and Japan, which came to be defined and “contained” through the taxonomic categorization of their arts according to imperialistic criteria. The

collecting urge has been often ascribed to aggressive drives, as a collection would exemplify the maker’s extended self and be a visible representation of his judgment and refined taste. Yet, in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, the Asian art collectors also seemed to seek engagement with other like-minded individuals, through sharing pleasure (and erudition) in their possessions.4 William Van Horne, Donald Alexander Smith (1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal), George Drummond, Richard B. Angus, and, in the next generation, the mmfa’s first director, Cleveland Morgan, along with architects William S. Maxwell, Percy Erskine Nobbs, and Ramsay Traquair, had a virtual encounter with Asia in different degrees, collecting a diverse array of “oriental” works of art without ever setting foot in Asia. Regrettably many of these precious possessions were dispersed after the death of their holders for various socio-economic and political reasons.5 They did not enjoy the fate of analogous collections in the United States, where donors instead sought to establish their personal memorial in local museums and made it possible for their collections to be properly maintained and preserved.6 Nevertheless, traces of the passion for Asia in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century can still be exhumed from the mmfa’s own reserves.

••• In Montreal, the two major collectors of Asian art objects were Sir William Van Horne (1843–1915) and Lord Strathcona (1820–1914) (fig. 9.1). It is not surprising that the two men bonded. Both were capitalist imperialists, born outside Canada, who had rapidly ascended in the Montreal elite thanks to their involvement in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were close neighbours on Dorchester Boulevard, now Blvd René-Lévesque, until Van Horne moved to Sherbrooke Street in 1889. Like Van Horne, Strathcona opened his mansion to the public (fig. 9.2). In 1888, journalists flocked in to admire his possessions, hailing his “palace” for its beauty and wealth: It is a spacious hall at the top of the house, which comprises a collection of curiosities both of nature and art, the source of which is indicated in its name. Vases and figures in enamel of wondrously skilful workmanship, rich manuscripts, painted (for the Japanese, paint instead of writing) by hand, objects of bronze – some of them chefs-d’oeuvres – in fine, a collection

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Figure 9.1 Spy [Sir Leslie Matthew Ward] (1851–1922), “Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal,” Vanity Fair, 19 April 1900, public domain.

such as may fearlessly be compared with the treasures in the Ethnographic Museum in the Louvre both for beauty and price.7 Strathcona’s house, like Van Horne’s, was intended as a private museum, its owner seen as the producer and sharer of knowledge. If the display of European art for both collectors reaffirmed their high status and colonial ideology, their shared confidence in the benefits of imperialism allowed them to collect Asian art as well. Most of their Asian possessions, promoted through the international fairs and the export companies, were a reflection of the empire, and they followed the model established in Britain of collecting non-Western objects with an imperialist, all-embracing gaze.

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Figure 9.2 Wm. Notman & Son, Lord Strathcona’s Residence, Montreal, Quebec, 1907. © McCord Museum, VIEW-4267.

The collections of both Strathcona and Van Horne included Chinese works of art. Strathcona’s treasury comprised forty Chinese bronze sculptures, two hundred porcelain items, as well as textiles and armour.8 His Chinese ceramics were allegedly attributed primarily to the “Ming dynasty,” although most likely included later Qing copies.9 Strathcona’s fascination with Chinese art may have been instilled through his business activities with the Canadian Pacific Railway. A fleet of its steamers secured the trade for the Orient, carrying cotton from the southern United States to China, and Strathcona was ecstatic about the possibilities of the “Oriental trade.”10 The mmfa has retained a beautiful Southern Song jianyao tea bowl (12th century, 1927.ed.3) from his daughter’s 1927 bequest. It is stylistically at odds with the rest of his possessions, which comprised mainly enamelled and gilded Japanese porcelain ware. Alexandria Pierce suggests that Strathcona may have acquired certain objects from John C. Ferguson, who co-organized the historic Shanghai exhibition of Chinese art in 1908, wrote several publications on Chinese art, and worked for the Imperial Chinese Railway Administration. As plausible as this railway connection could be, Ferguson’s involvement is difficult to prove.11 Van Horne’s Chinese collection, on the other hand, was primarily boosted through his network of US-based art dealers. Yamanaka Sadajiro, Matsuki Bunkio, and C.T. Loo supplied him with both Chinese and Japanese works of art, as they later did Cleveland Morgan.12 Among Van Horne’s Chinese artworks was an exquisite red cinnabar inlaid lacquer imperial throne, datable to the seventeenth century, now at the mmfa (1944.Df.10). Some valuable Chinese works of art from the collections of both Van Horne and Strathcona entered the Art Association of Montreal’s holdings for display in its “museum section.” Right after Strathcona’s death, his family was solicited for a donation: We are beginning a “museum section” in connection with the galleries and in the new building for the purpose of bringing together objects of use to the designer and worker as being good examples of various workmanship in the past, such as antique iron work, textiles, architectural design, china, embroidery, etc., and I am asked to find out if you would be inclined to aid this educational movement by giving the Association some of the fine examples

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of Japanese and other china which I understand remain in the old homestead here. A selection from these would be of very great value to us, as it would make a notable addition to the collections already installed.13 While Strathcona’s family paid no apparent attention to this plea at the time, Van Horne’s son, Richard, relinquished a small number of Chinese works that had belonged to his father. These were mostly delicate Southern Song– period ceramics (twelfth century), such as the remarkable Qingbai dish with kintsugi lacquer repair betraying a Japanese provenance (1917.Ed.5), and the stunning brush washer with moulded decoration – one of the finest examples of Longquan celadon in the mmfa’s collection (fig. 9.3).

••• Even though Van Horne and Strathcona purchased Chinese ceramics, their attention was caught elsewhere. The charm of Japan had reached the shores of North America by the late 1860s.14 In 1869, when the painter John La Farge, a friend of William Van Horne, published “An Essay on Japanese Art,” it was still seen as exotic and marginalized.15 That began to change when its decorative aspects were strongly marketed at the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876, and “things Japanese” started being consumed in America as part of the Aesthetic Movement.16

Figure 9.3 Longquan brush washer, Longquan ware, Zhejiang province, China, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), porcellaneous stoneware, moulded decoration, celadon glaze. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of R.B. Van Horne, inv. no. 1917.Ed.16. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

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Figure 9.4 Wm. Notman & Son, Fireplace, Lord Strathcona’s House, Montreal, Quebec, 1916. © McCord Museum, VIEW-16059.

Japanese prints, enamelled porcelains, and all sorts of decorative bibelots, often labelled as “bric-a-brac,” were made available in Montreal as suitable decorative complements to the mansions of the Golden Square Mile through the hands of a small number of self-proclaimed connoisseurs, including Henry Morgan and Co., the fashionable department store that belonged to Cleveland Morgan’s family.17 So popular was Japan with the Montreal elite that made-to-order furniture based on Asian prototypes was also offered by William Scott and Son, art dealers and decorators, who furnished Lord Strathcona’s residence and may have sold him several examples of Japanese Satsuma ware while doing so.18

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Strathcona might have never really sought advice from prominent experts of the time. Rather, he confided in local shops like William Scott or Henry Morgan, and relied on his friendship and business relations with Van Horne. This rapport may have something to do with at least a part of his Japanese art collection: Strathcona’s delight in acquiring the entire contents of a Japanese Buddhist temple and collecting over one hundred small tea caddies (cha-ire) might have reflected his intellectual curiosity and his own way of containing Japanese art as an “archive of intrinsic information,” a propensity which Van Horne further sublimated.19 It is important to distinguish between Japanese export ware and domestic pottery. The large number of small, unpretentious tea caddies owned by Van Horne, Strathcona, and subsequently Cleveland Morgan seems to suggest an unusual kind of interaction and appreciation of knowledge among these three collectors. Like Van Horne, Strathcona chose not to display his cha-ire with the decorative export Satsuma wares that instead furnished his grand living rooms. They are conspicuously absent in the photos taken by William Notman (fig. 9.4). Like Van Horne, Strathcona may have tucked away his cha-ire in his private study, where they could have served as his ultimate erudite pastime. Van Horne may have been the initiator of this taxonomic compulsion, since some of Strathcona’s items were first in Van Horne’s collection.20 Certainly Van Horne seemed more knowledgeable and demonstrated a long-term typological consistency in his acquisition practice, while Strathcona seemed ambivalently swayed between cha-ire and “modern” Japanese Satsuma ware. Van Horne’s handwritten catalogues are exquisite: for each piece entering his collection he would draw a preliminary sketch. When he had some time off from his busy schedule, he would paint some of these outstanding works in large watercolours. A later visitor to Van Horne’s residence in 1928 remarked on how impressive his drawings were: “there were folders full of them, which on their own were very worthwhile. The daily sketchbook looks well taken care of, and behind each artifact [sic] was the description, name, period, and year and if possible the maker and the price.”21 Such a taxonomic compulsion reflected the contemporary Victorian and Edwardian fixation about gathering information and displaying a microcosm representing the macrocosm, while implicitly containing it. A gendered misunderstanding of collecting separated the “scientific” activities of taxonomy and categorization (masculine) from the realm of mere accumulation (feminine).22 Eager collectors set out to define and taxonomically “contain” Japan by categorizing its arts according to sets of aesthetic criteria laid out by the

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British Empire.23 Imperial might encompassed the acquisition and organization of the information on objects from other areas of the world and their eventual display. British hegemony over universal knowledge was thus asserted: exhibitions of Asiatic material in Britain were closely linked to imperial aspirations, providing tangible proof of territorial and cultural hegemony.24 Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, keeper of medieval antiquities and ethnography at the British Museum from 1866 to 1896, provided an antecedent for collecting Japanese ceramics by writing pioneering books on the subject, and eventually bequeathing his extensive personal collection to the British Museum, including a large number of tea caddies.25 A copy of the Japanese pottery handbook compiled by Franks for the museum in 1880 (reprinted 1906), now in the mmfa library, once belonged to Van Horne.26 Like Franks, Van Horne and, most likely, Strathcona did not consider their collections of tea caddies as mere accumulation.27 Rather, they sought a systematic method of collecting and “containing” Japanese art. Van Horne, in particular, was more a scientist than an accumulator: he sought to demonstrate and embrace the true essence of Japan through his taxonomic approach and carefully illustrated catalogues. We can only assume that Strathcona showed a similar propensity for inventories, as unfortunately most of his original papers were destroyed after his death. Yet his typological consistency, encompassing over a hundred cha-ire, provides an inkling of his taxonomic compulsion. Van Horne certainly strived to be as impartial and scientific as possible when categorizing his self-contained, easy-to-handle tea caddies, trying not to be swayed by passion or beauty.28 Thus, small portable objects may have been preferred, as they could be physically “contained,” their Japaneseness captured by carefully assessing their body, glaze, and potters’ marks while secured in the hands of the collector.

••• The Art Association of Montreal (aam), today the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, originally stemmed out of the Montreal Society of Artists, founded in 1847 by a group of laymen and painters. Incorporated in 1860 and first based in Phillips Square, the aam sought to foster the arts with annual exhibitions and a school of design. By the 1880s, its council was composed of Montreal’s richest and most powerful anglophone businessmen related to the railway boom, including Strathcona, who had started exhibiting Asian works of art from his collection at the aam by that time.

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Van Horne joined the aam board in 1891, the same year that Strathcona was elected president, and later replaced him in that same position. Cleveland Morgan joined in 1907, introduced by Van Horne. Eight years later, Morgan was appointed to the Exhibition Committee, and in 1916 he became the chairman of the museum section, in effect the mmfa’s first director. Strathcona and Van Horne, together with Drummond and Angus, were among the most active members, eager to show the world that they were “arbiters of elegance and foremost in the field of culture mentally.”29 As ardent cultural imperialists, they strove to find a new location for a magnificent art gallery that would symbolize their ritual of citizenship.30 The new building on Sherbrooke Street was finally delivered in 1912 by Edward and William S. Maxwell, well-connected architects of Scottish descent.31 During the 1890s, the Maxwell brothers had carried out private commissions for all prominent directors of the cpr – including Richard B. Angus, Duncan McIntyre, T.G. Shaughnessy, and James Ross – while their firm was also working on different railway projects. They oversaw the renovation of the conservatory in Van Horne’s house on Sherbrooke Street, as well as the alterations on Strathcona’s mansion on Dorchester Boulevard, and built Van Horne’s summer houses in St Andrews (New Brunswick) and Selkirk (Manitoba). The Maxwells satisfied the Gramscian idea of “organic intellectuals”32 by giving form and substance to both the public and the private dreams of the residents of the Golden Square Mile. Even before the establishment of the art gallery on Sherbrooke Street, the Art Association of Montreal included Chinese and Japanese objects in its loan exhibitions, reflecting the interest of its members, who had received a glimpse of these “exotic” cultures through magazine subscriptions and sporadic export sales and were attracted to the idea of a pure and original Asian art.33 In fact, Strathcona began lending Chinese and Japanese works as early as December 1881 for the Decorative Art Objects Loan Collection Exhibition, and on various other occasions until 1893 (fig. 9.5).34 An “oriental” exhibition was originally planned in March 1887 to accompany the delivery of a talk on Japanese art by McGill professor of botany David Penhallow, while prospective lenders of Oriental “manufacture” were to be approached for loans: fabrics, ceramics, lacquers, and paintings were sought to impress the audience.35 In 1893, the annual loan exhibition included, besides the usual selection of European and Canadian paintings, a number of Chinese and Japanese bronzes datable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the lenders were both Strathcona and Van Horne (fig. 9.6).

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Figure 9.5 Art Association of Montreal, Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Decorative Art Objects, Bric-a-Brac, &c., &c.: Gallery of the Association, Phillips Square, December 1881. Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

Figure 9.6 Opposite Artist unknown, A Corner of the Gallery Inside the New Taylor Addition, Art Gallery, Phillips Square, ca 1893, gelatin silver print. Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo Archives, MMFA.

••• By the turn of the century, the interest of the aam had shifted toward Japanese works on paper. In the spring of 1902, there was an exhibition of Japanese “watercolours” – possibly prints – supervised by Matsuki Bunkio, the same Boston-based Japanese dealer who supplied Van Horne regularly.36 In the early twentieth century, Japanese prints became all the rage among members of the Montreal clubs, who often showed them on their walls.37 Both William Van Horne and Cleveland Morgan were members of the “for men only” Pen and Pencil Club, established in Montreal in 1890, as well as the Arts Club, founded

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in 1912.38 The latter awarded each of them the title of “life member” in 1914, at the same time as William S. Maxwell, one of the club’s founders and its first president (fig. 9.7). How fitting that the three men should be honoured at the same time. Like Van Horne and Morgan, Maxwell was intrigued by Japanese art, although he preferred works on paper to pottery. He organized the first exhibition of Japanese prints during the club’s inaugural year, and started lecturing on Japanese prints, apparently carving out a reputation as a connoisseur.39 He eventually left several examples to the aam in 1918, at the time of his appointment as member of the Library and Prints Committee. A total of fifty-one prints and drawings entered the Museum’s collection, including fifteen Japanese prints. Maxwell’s fellow architects, Percy Erskine Nobbs and Ramsay Traquair, both of whom also taught in subsequent periods at McGill University, shared his interest in Japan. The three of them were active in the aam, joining Morgan as members of its Library and Prints Committee during the inception of the

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Figure 9.7 Wm. Notman & Son, William Sutherland Maxwell, architect, Montreal, Quebec, 1898. © McCord Museum, II-124539.

Figure 9.8 Opposite Ramsay Traquair (1874–1952), Le Sabot Gardens, 1922, woodcut. Private Collection. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

association’s museum section.40 Ramsay Traquair was especially interested in decorative arts and advised Morgan on museum acquisitions. He paid several visits to Le Sabot, Morgan’s summer home in Senneville, and made a beautiful print of its gardens that betrays a subtle Japanese influence (fig. 9.8).

••• More than anybody, F. Cleveland Morgan (1881–1962) shaped the Asian collections of the mmfa, from its early days in 1916, first as curator of the museum section of the then aam and later as its president (from 1948 until his death in 1962) (fig. 9.9). When delving into the holdings at the museum, one cannot help but notice how deeply influenced Morgan was by his relationship with Van Horne. In many ways, Morgan’s appreciation for Asian art was swayed by his mentor’s experience. Like Van Horne, Morgan had a scientific education, while showing

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an early penchant for decorative arts. We do not know how they first met, but Morgan grew extremely fond of the already-aged Van Horne, and the two spent hours conversing on art and life. In a memoir letter addressed to McGill University principal Sir William Peterson and written on November 1915, two months after Van Horne’s death, Morgan wrote: The difference in our ages was, of course, considerable and would have been, with most men, a certain barrier to intimacy, but Sir William was so keen a student in all matters that he would question and query a younger man with as much interest as if conditions were reversed. Once he found you genuinely interested, his collections, his books and apparently his time were at your disposal. In fact he always seemed to find time for a talk and if ever, of necessity, he kept one waiting the apology was so courteous and ample that no feeling of intrusion was possible. His tastes were simple and he hated ostentation of any kind. He declared he would have gone to Japan but for a fear the Japanese Government would feel obliged to show him some sort of formal courtesy.41

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Figure 9.9 Ross Ballard, Ashley and Crippen Photography, Portrait of F. Cleveland Morgan, gelatin silver print. Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo Archives, MMFA.

As is evident from this personal account of his mentor, Morgan had been profoundly touched by Van Horne, to the point that he, too, collected Japanese tea-ware pottery – including a good number of cha-ire – which, like his “master,” he painstakingly drew in beautiful watercolours (figs. 9.10 and 9.11). In the first years of his appointment at the museum, and later as part of his will, Morgan donated 162 Japanese works of art, of which a staggering 43 were tea caddies, to make a fitting complement to the 217 Japanese works of art that Van Horne’s daughter, Adaline, had bequeathed to the aam in 1944.42 From the museum’s archive, it is possible to trace the passing of some of these small containers within a network of key collectors. Six came originally from Strathcona, one belonged to Morgan’s brother, James, while Van Horne had given another three to Morgan.43 Morgan was also instrumental in shaping the collection of Japanese prints at the museum, and not only through his connection with William Maxwell. Even though Asian works on paper had been exhibited at the aam before Morgan’s involvement, as previously discussed, it was the 1908 exhibition of

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Figure 9.10 Left F. Cleveland Morgan (1881–1962), Oribe-style tea caddy (cha-ire), ink and/or black and coloured watercolour, gum arabic highlights, grattage, on graphite. Private collection. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

Figure 9.11 Right Oribe-style tea caddy (cha-ire), Mino, Japan, Edo period (1615–1868), early seventeenth century, stoneware, painted decoration in underglaze iron-oxide brown under a green glaze, ivory lid. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, F. Cleveland Morgan Bequest, inv. no. 1962.Ee.43a-b. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

about a hundred ukiyo-e prints from Edward Colonna’s collection that provoked much interest among connoisseurs in Montreal. A German designer associated with the Paris style of the late-nineteenth century, Edward Colonna (1862–1948) came to America in 1882, where he briefly worked for Louis Tiffany and designed interiors for railroad cars. His fame might have brought him in contact with Van Horne after he moved to

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Montreal in 1889 to work as an architect and interior designer for the Canadian Pacific Railway.44 Eventually he was appointed as the personal decorator for Van Horne’s lavish new home on Sherbrooke Street (fig. 9.12). After a six-year stint in Paris, designing for Siegfried Bing’s shop, la Maison de L’Art Nouveau, Colonna returned to Canada in 1903, taking up residence in Toronto. In March 1908, his collection of ukiyo-e prints, which he had amassed in Paris, was offered at two sales at the American Art Galleries in New York.45 Prior to these sales, the prints had been exhibited in Montreal and prominently featured in local newspapers as “The Great Masters of Ukioye [sic] whose prints and paintings mirror Japanese life.”46 Ernest Fenollosa, the eminent American expert of Japanese art, was invited to give a lecture on Japanese prints at the museum in conjunction with the exhibition.47 Cleveland Morgan acquired a considerable number of prints, some paintings,

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Figure 9.12 Opposite Artist unknown, Interior of the Van Horne residence, Montreal, Quebec, ca 1900. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e003641843.

Figure 9.13 Left –shu –sai Sharaku (Japan, active 1794–95), Iwai To – IV as Shigenoi, 1794–1795, woodcut. Hanshiro Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, F. Cleveland Morgan Bequest, inv. no. Gr.1986(1962.Ee.95).63. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

and ceramic objects from Colonna between 1909 and 1913.48 Four prints are currently in the mmfa’s holdings (fig. 9.13).

••• Through their compulsive, taxonomic mode of collecting, Strathcona and Van Horne represented how Japanese objects were received, appropriated, and consumed in late-nineteenth-century Canada. Through their “imperial archives,” both collectors gathered information and considered it as the knowledge they needed to excel in a materialistic environment.49 Moreover, they came to the realization that their collections and their participation in the aam could forge culture in the newly created and rapidly expanding nation. Both were aware that visual arts, especially European, recalled the values of the society they aimed to imitate and recreate. But their common

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curiosity about small, unostentatious Japanese tea ware further reflected their “gentlemanly” taxonomic curiosity, betraying their subconscious colonialist desire to contain Japan in their hands. On account of his personal connections, Cleveland Morgan, the mmfa’s first director, was introduced into this intimate clique of Japanophiles, and fell victim to the same exclusive erudition, collecting tea caddies for a short while. Strathcona’s and Van Horne’s collecting habits trickled down into the hundreds of tea caddies, wrapped up in splendid textile bags, now on the shelves of the mmfa’s reserve. Thanks to Morgan, both men’s ceramic collections, albeit partially, formed the incipient core of the mmfa’s Asian collections. Morgan also assisted in the acquisition of several ukiyo-e prints owned by William S. Maxwell, among the earliest works to be offered to the new museum. The four men, in different ways but with similar intent, all contributed to shaping the idea of “authentic” Japan in Montreal at the time, leaving behind over 240 cha-ire and ukiyo-e prints as their legacy. n otes 1 Mackay, The Square Mile. 2 Known until 1949 as the Art Association of Montreal (aam). 3 It is by chance that Senator George Drummond and Lord Strathcona, both governing members in the Art Association of Montreal (aam) and the Mount Royal Club, donated the first Orientalist paintings in the mmfa’s collection. Drummond donated Benjamin Constant’s Le lendemain d’une victoire a l’Halambra (1882), acc.no.1908.27, while Strathcona bequeathed Constant’s Le soir sur les terrasses (1879), acc. no. 1927.243. Banham, “Architecture and Painting Collection of the Mount Royal Club.” 4 Formanek, “Why They Collect”; and Belk, “Collectors and Collecting,” 32. 5 Art bequests became less possible in Canada due to the reduced circumstances brought on, in large measure, by Canada’s contribution of men and money to the British Empire during World War I and the introduction of personal income tax. 6 Carol Duncan’s theory of the ritual of citizenship: the art museum is a ritual site, emulating the form of temples or palaces in order to replace religion and the aura surrounding royalty with the cult of art. Citizens performed a ritual while building a museum and its collections, compelled by their desire to be seen as civilized and civilizing. Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” 282–3. 7 The Gazette, “A Palace of Art – A Visit to Sir Donald Smith’s Art Gallery and Museum,” 16 Sept. 1888. The house was demolished in 1941. 8 Just the Asian material was valued in 1927 at over $200,000, an impressive amount for the

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time that surprisingly rivalled his almost equally appraised European collection. The inventory prepared by William Scott and Sons in 1914 for the insurance firm of Craddock Simpson Co. of Montreal, at the request of Royal Trust, records a large number of Satsuma swords guards, knife handles, swords gold lacquers, and suits of armour, plus carvings (netsuke and okimono), tapestries, and other furnishings of a Japanese temple for the total value of $236,000. mmfa Strathcona file. Norton, “Oriental Treasures from the Strathcona Collection,” Canadian Homes and Gardens, Toronto, June 1928: 96–104. A descriptive list of 151 ceramics from the original 1927 Strathcona bequest that were sent for sale to Henry Morgan and Co. Ltd in 1940 is in the mmfa archives (D.A. Smith file). Naylor, Canada in the European Age, 1453–1919, 476. Pierce, “Imperialist Intent, Colonial Response.” If true, Ferguson should have offered him more valuable antiquities, judging from his high-profile dealings with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Netting, A Perpetual Fire. See Lawton, “Yamanaka Sadajirô”; Sharf, et al., A Pleasing Novelty; Wang, “C.T. Loo.” Letter by Sir John Abbott to Lady Strathcona, 27 February 1917, in lac, “Strathcona Papers” mh29a5, vol. 1, according to Pierce, Imperialist Intent, Colonial Response, 167. Nakashima, “Defining Japanese Art in America.” La Farge, Across America and Asia, cited by Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture, 20. Eclectic ornamentation, from Egyptian sculptures to Renaissance-style stained glass, adorned everyday life from public buildings to the most ordinary objects. As a prolific period of artistic creativity, especially in the decorative arts, the 1870s, 1880s, and early 1890s played an active role in the transformation of American life. The movement served as the matrix of the “Japan craze” in America, and thus, the “Japan craze” occurred mostly in the sphere of the decorative arts. Nakashima, “Defining Japanese Art in America,” 255. The title of the catalogue for the Loan exhibition of 1881 at the Art Association of Montreal was “Decorative Objects-Bric-a-Brac” – perhaps insinuating they were not quite fine-arts quality. Collard, End of an Era, 15. Craddock Simpson’s Inventory, D.A. Smith file, mmfa archives. For a detailed description of the Imperial model of the archive as a repository of all knowledge, see Richards, The Imperial Archive. Recent observation in the mmfa reserves suggests that tea caddies were passed on from Van Horne to Strathcona. After Eggermont-Molenaar, The William Van Horne Collection, 28. Clunas, “Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art,” 318–54, especially 323. Earle, “The Taxonomic Obsession.” Richards, The Imperial Archive. Rousmaniere, “A.W. Franks, N. Ninagawa, and the British Museum.” Franks, Japanese Pottery. The same collecting strategy was promoted by Edward Sylvester Morse in Boston. He not

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only corresponded with Van Horne, but also came to Montreal on several occasions to further assess his collection. In this essay, his vital contribution is only mentioned. For further information on Morse and Van Horne, see Akiko Takesue’s contribution to this catalogue. See memoir by Cleveland Morgan, 55. The Gazette, 4 Dec. 1909. Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” 282–3. Pepall, The Architecture of Edward and W.S. Maxwell, 24. Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” in Prison Notebooks, 1926–37. Quoted in Sweeney, “Building for Power: The Maxwell Practice and the Montreal Business Community” (cac.mcgill.ca/Maxwell/essay). Such as the seminal revue Le Japon Artistique, published in six volumes by the leading European dealer, Siegfried Bing, between 1888 and 1891. And Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art, 81. “[A] a collection of Japanese work, including vases of copper and porcelain, decorated with cloisonné enamels, vases of Kaga, Awata and Satsuma wares and large decorated jar with cover.” Montreal Herald and Daily, 9 Dec., 1881. https://www.mbam.qc.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2016/07/coupures-de-presse-vol-1-1864-1887.pdf. . Mention of a possible future loan exhibition of Chinese and Japanese art is given in the aam Annual Report 1887. aam Annual Report, 1880–1892 (Montreal, 1881–93). However, no traces of the exhibition taking place are recorded. mmfa exhibition files online, https://www.mbam.qc.ca/ mbam-repertoire-des-expositionsdepuis-1860. Some of this interest might have trickled down, as it is also traceable when looking at old pictures of the University Club, its dining room featuring several ukiyo-e prints on the walls in 1913. Courtesy of Rosalind Pepall, art historian and emeritus curator for decorative arts mmfa. From the photographic album, University Club of Montreal, Box 14. See Morgan, “F. Cleveland Morgan and the Decorative Arts Collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,” 34–50; The Pen and Pencil Club archival fund notes, courtesy of Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art before 1945, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, property of the McCord Museum of History; and Cox, Portrait of a Club, available in the Arts Club Archives, mmfa. Between 1916 and 1919 Maxwell delivered some lectures on Japanese prints at the Arts Club. Stéphane Carrier, the Arts Club Digital Archive Fund (P2), mmfa 1999. aam report, 1916. Excerpt from Letter Memoir Written by F. Cleveland Morgan and Addressed to McGill University Magazine, courtesy of Bruce Russell. Russell has exhaustively recorded all Morgan’s documents, kept until recently in his cottage, Le Sabot, in Senneville. Vaughan, The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne. Morgan entered three cha-ire in 1918 (1918.ee.2a-b, 3a-b, 4a-b), among the first Asian acquisitions for the museum.

Laura Vigo

43 Respectively 1962.ee.64a-b, 1962.ee.61a-b, 1962.ee.62a-b, 1962.Ee.63a-b, 1962.ee.79a-b, 1962.ee.49a-b; 1919.ee.1a-b; 1962.ee.46a-b, 1962.ee.45a-b, 1962.ee.78a-b. 44 Colonna was instrumental in developing the Château style for the CPR stations across Canada. His sketches have been found in the Maxwell brothers’ archival fond (McGill University). See essay by Eidelberg, “E. Colonna.” 45 There were 939 objects listed, including prints, paintings, and ceramics (https://archive.org/ details/b1465903). 46 An entire page was devoted to the exhibition, “One hundred prints from the collection of E. Colonna of New York,” Montreal Star, 1 Feb. 1908. 47 “Mr Fenollosa on Japanese Art,” Montreal Star, 10 February 1908. 48 Akiko Takesue, mmfa internship report, 2011. 49 Richards, The Imperial Archive.

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Japan Contained

Information on documents and notes can be found on page 196

Akiko Takesue

The Social Life of the Van Horne Japanese Ceramic Collection

My first encounter with the Japanese ceramics from the former collection of Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (1843–1915) was in the storage of the Royal Ontario Museum (rom) in Toronto in 2001. The approximately 150 pieces consist mainly of humble tea bowls, sake bottles, vases, and other utilitarian pieces of stoneware and earthenware, most of which were made for the domestic market in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Although the group also includes several colourful decorative pieces that are aesthetically appealing, it looked to me of mixed quality, without any items of particular significance. Later, in 2003, I discovered that these pieces had been part of a larger collection of Japanese ceramics – approximately twelve hundred in total – assembled by Van Horne, a self-made railway tycoon in Montreal. I also learned that it had enjoyed a high reputation during the collector’s lifetime, and that over two hundred pieces were owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa) as well. I began to ask myself: what made such a renowned collector amass so many ordinary Japanese ceramics? Why was his collection so highly esteemed at the time? And how did it happen that so many of his pieces remained in the storage of two such prestigious museums? In 2007, an incident occurred that further puzzled me. A simple tea bowl from the rom’s Van Horne ceramics collection was assessed by a Japanese expert as a genuine piece made by one of Japan’s most renowned potters, Nonomura Ninsei (active ca 1646–1677).1 Despite the fact that this tea bowl bears the potter’s mark, it had been described as a forgery in the rom’s

collection record. This surprise raised another question: under what circumstances had the genuine Ninsei piece been dismissed as inauthentic? Van Horne’s Japanese ceramic collection has experienced changes in its status, from the high reputation during the collector’s lifetime to an ambiguous status in museum storage thereafter. In this essay, I examine how these gaps in the collection’s reception were created over the course of the “social life” of these Japanese ceramics. According to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the value of objects derives from a series of judgments made by various parties. In other words, the meaning of objects is not inherent, but constructed through a social mechanism – and objects thus have social lives.2 Tracing Van Horne’s collecting activities, the influence of his dealers and fellow collectors, the inheritance by his descendants, and the fate of the items within the rom and the mmfa after donation, makes it clear that his collection has been understood and evaluated through the dynamic interactions among objects, people, and institutions at different times and places.

••• William Van Horne began acquiring Japanese ceramics in February 1883, when he bought five pieces from an auction sale in New York.3 His initial interest inclined toward decorative ceramics produced for export to the West. By 1893, however, his focus shifted to simple utilitarian ceramics made for the Japanese domestic market, and they were to remain his obsession. From the extensive records he started to keep in January 1893, we can tell that Van Horne’s primary passion lay in researching and identifying the types of individual pieces and the regional kilns where they were made.4 In other words, he was more interested in the classifiable aspect of Japanese ceramics than in their aesthetic quality. This approach to collecting echoes the obsession with scientific taxonomy, the collector’s desire for the formation of self-identity, and the control over the culture of the Other, all prevalent in Victorian Britain.5 At the same time, Van Horne’s intimate connection and attentiveness to the materiality of Japanese domestic ceramics, particularly through the sense of touch, further suggests that he was more interested in the objects in his hands as they were, rather than as a projection of any ideology. Van Horne’s intimate engagement with domestic ware stood in marked contrast to how he dealt with his export ware. He displayed about one hundred fine Satsuma or Imari pieces in the public rooms of his home, along with his magnificent collection of

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Figure 11.1 Margaret Van Horne, Van Horne Residence Interior Displaying Chinese Ceramics and a Satsuma Incense Burner, 1910s, 25.4 ! 20.5 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S14.F6.1. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 11.3 Artist unknown, Interior of William Van Horne’s Residence (detail), ca 1900. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e999908308.

Figure 11.2 Globular incense burner decorated with polychrome enamels and gold with lid, Kagoshima, Japan, Edo period, 19th century, stoneware, 21 ! 9.5 ! 18.3 cm. Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne, Royal Ontario Museum, 944.12.11. Photo credit: Brian Boyle © Royal Ontario Museum.

European and American paintings and other fine objects (figs. 11.1 and 11.2). They functioned primarily as interior decoration, as seen in the residences of other prominent Montreal collectors, such as Sir George Stephen and Lord Strathcona. In contrast, Van Horne kept over a thousand domestic ceramics in his second-floor study, a private space used exclusively by him, where they were roughly grouped according to his own numbering system. Here he engaged with individual pieces – examined, catalogued, and illustrated them. In addition to recording in seven notebooks, Van Horne drew more than eighty watercolours of individual pieces of his Japanese ceramics in 1896. In examining Japanese ceramic objects, it is essential to hold them, to feel their texture and weight, to turn them around to see the sides and bottom. Legend has it that Van Horne was skilled at identifying Japanese ceramics, while blindfolded, by touch alone.6 Every piece was meaningful for him, not in terms of its individual quality but for its ability to evoke feelings, especially a “tactile imagination.”7

••• “There is no royal road in collecting things of which so few have accurate knowledge,” William Van Horne once wrote, “and everybody is bound to get stuck more or less, and I must confess to having had [sic] full share of such experiences.”8 Unlike some of his fellow collectors, Van Horne never visited Japan, despite his passion for things Japanese, his impressive contacts, and the many invitations. His selection of Japanese ceramics was therefore confined to those available to him through dealers in Japan, in North America, and in Europe, even though he is often described as a collector who acquired only pieces that he liked without much influence from dealers.9 Since little other expertise on Japanese domestic ceramics was available in the West at the time, dealers served not only as merchants but also as scholars. Their perspectives and mercantile intent were thus reflected on the formation of the Van Horne collection one way or another. Akusawa Susumu (active 1880s to 1890s), Van Horne’s first Japanese dealer, played a significant role in the early development of the collection. Between 1887 and 1893, Akusawa sold Van Horne approximately 160 pieces of refined ceramics, often with colourful painted decoration, all made exclusively for export. When Van Horne started keeping his notebooks at the beginning of 1893, he referred to Akusawa as one of his three major sources of information.10 However, as Van Horne’s interest shifted to domestic ceramics, his

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Figures 11.4(1), 11.4(2) Akusawa Susumu, Letter to Sir William Van Horne, 5 December 1895. Library and Archives Canada, Sir William Van Horne fonds, e011202112-001 to e011202112-008.

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commercial interaction with Akusawa decreased, even though they maintained a personal connection (figs. 11.4(1) and 11.4(2)).11 Akusawa’s letter, with his illustration of Van Horne as a Bodhidarma, indicates his closeness to his joke-loving friend, as well as his respect for him. A second major source was Shugio Hiromichi (1853–1927), a Japanese art dealer based in New York and Tokyo.12 Van Horne acquired about seventy pieces from Shugio, either as purchases or gifts, and comments by Shugio appear throughout the multiple volumes of Van Horne’s notebooks. The two men likely met around 1892, and they maintained a close connection to the end of Van Horne’s life. “Mr. Shugio’s taste and knowledge are more catholic,” Van Horne wrote, “and he has a knowledge of ‘things Japanese,’ which Professor Morse, whose special knowledge does not extend far beyond keramics [sic], does not have.”13

Akiko Takesue

Here Van Horne was referring to his third and most influential advisor, Edward Sylvester Morse (1838–1925), an American zoologist who was invited by the Japanese government to teach at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1877. Morse was inspired to collect Japanese domestic ceramics by Ninagawa Noritane (1835–1882), a Japanese official and scholar of ceramics, whom he frequently visited during his second stay in Japan between 1878 and 1879. Ninagawa’s ambition through his publications, Kanko Zusetsu (Illustrated Review of Old Things), was to illustrate the complete production of Japanese domestic ceramics and to classify them by origin, type, and date, based on the observation of actual objects14 (figs. 11.6(1) and 11.6(2)). Ninagawa’s scientific approach prompted Morse to attempt to gather as many examples of Japanese ceramics from as many kilns as possible.15 He received more than 1,000 pieces from his Japanese mentor, and over time amassed nearly 6,000 objects, 5,400 of which are now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (mfab). Morse’s strict purpose was specimen gathering, rather than collecting beautiful pieces. “I am thus explicit in justification of the apparent redundant exhibition of specimens in some of the provincial groupings,” he wrote in the preface of Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery, published in 1901, “and the display of certain specimens which are more curious than beautiful, and in some instances even positively ugly”16 (figs. 11.5(1) and 11.5(2)). Though the details of the first encounter between Van Horne and Morse sometime around 1892 are unknown, it proved the decisive moment for Van Horne’s collection. Through Morse, Van Horne discovered the diverse nature of Japanese ceramics made for the domestic market, as well as a taxonomic approach to their documentation and display. Morse’s comments are frequently found in the Van Horne notebooks, while Van Horne is included among the significant contributors to Morse’s own landmark collection.17 A letter from Van Horne to Morse dated October 26, 1899, for example, suggests their close friendship and frequent communication. Van Horne draws a small illustration within it and asks, “The bottle resembling this rough sketch (from memory) near the left hand of the upper shelf must surely be Maiko and I suspect two or more others on the same shelf. I am probably wrong but my anxiety concerning the infallibility of the attributions in the Morse collection leads me to lay at your feet any doubt I may have”18 (figs. 11.7(1) and 11.7(2)). This letter also demonstrates Van Horne’s confidence in his expertise on Japanese ceramics, since he argues with Morse, who was by then a leading

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Figure 11.5 (1) Right Edward S. Morse, Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1901. MMFA, Library. Photo Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest.

Figure 11.5 (2) Below Artist unknown, Photo of Edward S. Morse, exhibition catalogue, Japan Day by Day, 1978, 40. Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Figures 11.6 (1), 11.6(2) Ninagawa Noritane, Kanko Zusetsu (Illustrated Review of Old Things), 1876. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Library. Photo: MMFA, Christine Guest.

Figures 11.7(1), 11.7(2) Above and opposite William Van Horne, Letter to Edward S. Morse, 26 October 1899. E2, Box 14, Folder 7, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

scholar of Japanese ceramics in the United States. Van Horne established his own way of collecting – his numbering system was based on the acquisition date, while Morse categorized his collection by type. Morse aimed for completeness, and collected from a sense of a mission to save a vanishing tradition of Japanese domestic ceramics.19 Van Horne was, on the contrary, more interested in the act of handling and examining the actual objects, without any

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sense of mission. Van Horne’s intimate engagement with the individual objects he collected is a clear departure from Morse’s scientific, objective attitude. The encounter with Morse was pivotal also because he connected Van Horne with Matsuki Bunkio (1867–1940), Morse’s disciple, who became Van Horne’s most influential dealer (fig. 11.8). Since the first purchase from Matsuki of thirty-four pieces of various domestic ware in December 1892,20 Van Horne acquired another 167 objects from him between 1893 and 1894; yet another 251 pieces between 1897 and 1899. The launch of the multivolume catalogues at the beginning of 1893 clearly demonstrates the impact of Van Horne’s encounter with Matsuki and his merchandise.

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Figure 11.8 Artist unknown, Matsuki Bunkio (the collector) in Japan. Library number N/7336/Ma. Library, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan.

Matsuki, young and ambitious, made good use of the newly established retailing tool of advertisement,21 and he used the fact of his being Japanese to emphasize the uniqueness and authenticity of his merchandise as “the true work of the best artists in Japan … found in daily use in the Japanese homes themselves.”22 His low prices were also a reason for his success, especially in dealing with Van Horne. While Van Horne did not mind spending consider-

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able amounts of money for European paintings, the low prices of Japanese ceramics seemed to be an important factor in his decision to collect them. In his eagerness to study and identify individual objects, he wanted to purchase a large number at once and at a relatively small cost. For these reasons, his interaction with Siegfried Bing (1838–1905) and Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–1906), two of the best-known tastemakers and suppliers of Japanese ceramics in latenineteenth-century Europe, was limited.23 Matsuki was not only a source for acquisition, but also of information. His numerous observations are recorded in the Van Horne notebooks; he translated notes from Japanese sources for Van Horne; he even sent him Japanese food that would not have been easily obtainable in Canada at the time, such as soy sauce, miso, sake, bamboo shoots, and some rare delicacies eaten while drinking sake.24 After 1901, however, their relationship grew more distant as Van Horne’s interest in acquiring Japanese ceramics diminished, partly because he had begun work on the Cuban national railway in 1900, and partly due to the shift in Matsuki’s business strategy from being a dealer of affordable objects to being an art dealer of more expensive pieces. In December 1900, for example, he sold Van Horne a vase attributed to Ninsei for seventy-five dollars, a price rarely found in their earlier transactions.25 For Van Horne, this shift was not favourable. By 1906 Van Horne had stopped acquiring Japanese ceramics altogether. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the increasing popularity of Chinese ceramics, the North American market for Japanese ware started to be separated into “art ceramics for collectors” and “utilitarian ceramics for consumers.” Collectors and scholars, both in Japan and in the West, sought a systematic, art-historical understanding of Japanese art, with the result that ceramic objects from Japan were increasingly seen as works of art. Dealers had to follow suit by promoting the aesthetic quality of individual ceramics, rather than just their variety and quantity. This broad shift in market trends also explains the disappearance of Yamanaka and Co., a Boston dealer, from Van Horne’s records. Van Horne had purchased from Yamanaka a variety of Japanese ceramics in bulk between 1898 and 1900. Their relationship did not last beyond 1902, however, after Yamanaka successfully re-established himself as an art dealer.

•••

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Figure 11.9 Artist unknown, “Sir William Van Horne’s Collection of Japanese Pottery,” The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors 34 (1912): 9–14. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

The Van Horne collection of Japanese ceramics was widely known internationally, and enjoyed a high reputation during the collector’s lifetime. The earliest reference appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1904, which described the collection in a highly favourable manner and independently from his painting collection.26 In 1912, The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors included an article devoted to the Van Horne Japanese collection, along with ten photographs. The anonymous author claimed that it covered “the whole range of the ceramic art of Japan,” and was of “a high standard of quality and art interest”27 (fig. 11.9). In 1906, the famous British art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934), after visiting Van Horne in Montreal, declared in a private letter to his wife, Helen, that the Van Horne Japanese ceramic collection was “the most marvellous collection of Japanese pottery, I believe the finest in the world. Anyhow they are amazing.”28

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The collection’s high reputation can also be seen after Van Horne’s death, in magazine articles, newspaper reports, and biographies. They variously describe it as “priceless,” “valuable,” “the greatest” in Canada, or “almost complete.”29 However, few of them deal with the contents in detail. This suggests that the popular appreciation of the collection was based on the collector’s persona as an elite businessman with a powerful personality, who was also known to possess a large and important painting collection, rather than on the actual objects. In other words, Van Horne himself became the source of the meaning and value of his objects. A gap between the collector’s reputation and the quality of the objects was, in fact, indicated by art professionals who examined the collection in person. For example, Otto Kümmel (1874–1952), the founding director of the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin, regretted in a letter to a colleague in 1906 that “the quality does not match the quantity of the pieces or the interest of the owner. It doesn’t go beyond the level of most collections in Europe.”30 Both the general public and the art experts failed to understand the multifaceted relationship between Van Horne and his objects, in particular, his interests in the object’s tactility and proximity, which is brought into sharp relief when it is compared to similar collections of his time. Unlike Edward Morse or A.W. Franks (1826–1897), curator at the British Museum, he was not interested in covering whole geographical areas of ceramic production in Japan from the scientific point of view. Nor did he collect with Franks’s imperial mission to understand “Others,” or Morse’s personal mission of saving the vanishing tradition of Japan. Unlike C.L. Freer (1854–1919), a great Detroit collector, he did not base his collection on aesthetic choices from the art-historical point of view that was emerging at the turn of the twentieth century.31 Furthermore, Van Horne did not leave his collection to the nation at the end of his life, as these three other collectors did. Instead, Van Horne’s interests lay in the direct connection with the objects he could touch and study. The fact that Van Horne’s personality and social status functioned as a significant component of his collection’s meaning and value, would lead to the progressive degradation of its reputation following his demise.

••• When Sir William Van Horne died in 1915, his entire collection of paintings and decorative arts was inherited by his wife, Lady Lucy Adaline Van Horne (1837–1929), his daughter, Adaline Van Horne (1868–1941) (fig. 11.10), and his

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Figure 11.10 Artist unknown, Photo of William Van Horne’s daughter, Adaline, ca 1930. Library and Archives Canada, e007914036.

son, Richard Benedict Van Horne (1877–1931). These three family members inherited four-twelfths, three-twelfths, and five-twelfths of the collection, respectively, although who would receive which particular items was not specified at this point. Everything remained in place at the family residence in Montreal until 1944, and the Japanese ceramics in Van Horne’s study were left as they had been during his lifetime. In 1918, at the family’s behest, Edward Morse examined the Japanese ceramics, probably for appraisal purposes. This was the first evaluation of the entire collection by someone other than Van Horne. More importantly, it was the first assessment of the quality of the objects. Some pieces were singled out as “good”; the rest were viewed, collectively by cabinet group, as “specimens” of

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Japanese ceramics. This selective view reflected the gradual shift in the broad perception of Japanese ceramics toward an art-historical point of view, with an emphasis on privileged “canonical” works from the beginning of the twentieth century. The evaluation of the Van Horne collection, an earlier type of collection with a focus on the quantity rather than the quality of objects, became diminished. When Van Horne’s daughter, Adaline, died in 1941, her will stipulated that her portion of her father’s collection – a quarter of the whole – would be donated to the Art Association of Montreal (aam), the forerunner of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa). The remaining three-quarters belonging to Van Horne’s wife and son, who had died in 1929 and 1931 respectively, were transferred to his only grandchild, William C.C. Van Horne (1907–1946), in 1942. As a result, within that same year, Van Horne’s Japanese ceramics and other collections were subjected to serious valuations for the processes of division and subsequent donation. The process lasted until February 1945. Two museum curators were involved in dividing the Japanese ceramics, with markedly different approaches. F. Cleveland Morgan (1881–1962), himself a wealthy Montreal collector, as well as the unofficial curator of the decorativearts section at the aam, was not very active in or happy about the dispersal, as he knew that Van Horne had wanted to see the collection kept together. In sharp contrast, Charles T. Currelly (1876–1957), the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum,32 was both enthusiastic and engaged (fig. 11.11). He had known Van Horne when the latter donated 150 Japanese ceramics to the rom’s predecessor around 1910, and in 1941 he approached William C.C. Van Horne and his wife, Margaret (d. 1987), in what was likely an effort to secure another donation for his museum. Currelly succeeded in gaining the couple’s trust in finalizing the division of Japanese ceramics, and eventually received a donation of thirty-four Japanese tea bowls, including the Ninsei piece discussed in the introduction. These pieces were, in fact, what Currelly had set aside during the division process. After the donations of some three hundred pieces to the two museums in 1944, all the rest were bequeathed to Margaret, who became the sole heir to the house and its contents following her husband’s death in 1946.33 She consigned them to two auction sales at Sotheby’s London in 1968 and sold others to local dealers (fig. 11.12). As a result, except for a few dozen pieces still in the possession of family members, the largest remnants are the approximately 350 pieces now housed at the rom and the mmfa.

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Figure 11.11 Artist unknown, Photo of Charles T. Currelly (1876–1957). University of Toronto Archives, Digital Image No: 2004-30-7MS.

••• Attitudes toward the Van Horne objects did not remain fixed within the museums and, indeed, became increasingly negative, as evidenced by the changing descriptions in the historical records of the museum catalogues. Updated scholarship in Japanese art history, as well as the shift in the idea of “authentic Japanese ceramics” from anything found in homes in Japan to selected canonical pieces in the history of Japanese art, provided a context in which the Van Horne collection became perceived as unimportant. The meaning-formation of the objects was also impacted by the rom’s evolving institutional operations and the orientations and interests of its curators. After the 1944 donation, the total number of Van Horne ceramics reserved at the rom was 184, of which only certain numbers had been on display in 1914 at the opening of the rom.34 By the late 1940s, there was an effort within the museum to verify the information on record about the Van Horne donations, and the opinions of two external Japanese scholars were given more sway than those provided by Van Horne decades earlier. The professionalization and sys-

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Figure 11.12 Sotheby and Co., A Remarkable Collection of Japanese Pottery, London, 1968. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

tematization of knowledge in the early twentieth century deprived Van Horne, an amateur collector, of the status of expert. Ironically, however, some of those scholars’ opinions were later revised again, with Van Horne’s original information reappearing in the reference material. In 1969, when part of the rom’s Far Eastern collection was deaccessioned, twenty-two of Van Horne’s original donation of 139 Japanese ceramics were disposed of. While the urgent need to secure more storage space must have justified the decision, the fact that some of the Van Horne Japanese ceramics were selected for disposal only added to the already undesirable impression of this group of objects.

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After 1975, the opinions and preferences of the first curator of Japanese art, Dr Hugh Wylie (1942–1999), played a key role in the decisions about which objects were significant within the rom’s Japanese collection, as well as in how the catalogue information was to be updated. Wylie was an art historian who specialized in Japanese literati painting, with a highly versatile knowledge of Japanese art history as a whole. His hard work and enthusiasm are apparent in the files he kept and in the recollections of his former colleagues.35 When it came to the Van Horne objects, however, Wylie was not very enthusiastic. Although “they are extremely useful to a diverse Japanese collection like the rom’s,” he noted, they were “not always the ceramic masterworks sought by more specialized museums.”36 He also described them as “low-fired earthenware from lesser-known kilns,” even though many are actually stoneware.37 Wylie’s perception of their relative unimportance became the general view, and it was reflected in the ways their catalogue information was transferred as the rom’s cataloguing system was updated from notebooks to cards in the 1960s, and then to computer database in the late 1980s. Due to Wylie’s selective approach, the amount of information on the Van Horne Japanese ceramics in the catalogue cards varied greatly, depending on the object, as opposed to the previous catalogue notebooks, in which every piece was recorded equally. In addition, little information was transferred to the computerized database.38 By the end of the twentieth century, the collective identity of Van Horne’s Japanese ceramics at the rom had been firmly established as an unimpressive collection without any significant masterpieces. Most of the objects remained in storage and were rarely put on display. This negative perception, along with the scarce catalogue information in the database, coloured my own judgment when I started working for the rom’s Japanese collection in 2001, and it was reinforced during the process of creating what became the Prince Takamado Gallery of Japan between 2003 and 2005, under the leadership of Dr Klaas Ruitenbeek. Ruitenbeek’s vision was to create a small, yet aesthetically appealing, gallery, to contrast with the adjoining Chinese galleries, which displayed the rom’s rich holdings. Thus, the notions of art-historical significance and authenticity came to the fore. After reviewing the Van Horne ceramics, I concluded that, while it included some fine Satsuma export ware, there were no more than fifteen pieces worthy of permanent exhibition in the new gallery, a half of which indeed were decorative export ware and not the domestic ceramics that Van Horne collected with such passion.

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Figure 11.13 Installation view of Sir William Cornelius Van Horne display in “Collecting Asia: The First 50 Years, 1908–1958,” Herman Herzog Levy Gallery, Level 1. Photo Credit: Brian Boyle © Royal Ontario Museum.

As is the fate of most collections donated to museums, the original context of the objects is often lost once they become part of a museum collection and are understood within a different system and set of relationships. For the Van Horne Japanese ceramics, however, the removal of the original context was only partial. For the pieces selected for the Japan Gallery, their former identity as part of Van Horne’s collection was de-emphasized: they were put into the new context of the rom’s Japanese collection. Those not selected for the gallery remained in storage, within an undesirable collective identity as the Van Horne

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pieces. Even the Ninsei tea bowl, which was to be deemed authentic by an external scholar in 2007, suffered neglect because of its association with the others.

••• How did the difference in the reception of the Van Horne Japanese ceramic collection emerge? Did the Van Horne collection, once highly esteemed, remain in museum storage because Van Horne, his heirs, and the early museum personnel lacked sufficient art-historical knowledge to understand the objects properly? If that is the case, it would prove that the idea of what constitutes “authentic” Japanese ceramics has never changed. But how would this “fixed idea of authenticity” explain the great enthusiasm with which Sir William Van Horne collected over twelve hundred pieces, meticulously researched them, and recorded each of them with such attentive care in his handwritten notebooks? The meaning of objects is, instead, a production of multiple interactions among people, institutions, and societies at given times and places, in which the idea of authenticity itself keeps changing. And if the idea of authenticity itself changes, then any understanding of the objects cannot be simply dismissed as “wrong.” From this new perspective, the Van Horne ceramics no longer represent incorrect interpretations of what is authentic or worthy by an ignorant collector. They are an embodiment of the original collector’s passion, which just happens to be in conflict with a prevailing narrative in the museum today. Indeed, a shift in meaning is taking place once more and at this very moment, as the Van Horne Japanese ceramics enter into a new phase of their social life with the Obsession exhibition. After more than a century hidden away in Van Horne’s study and museum storage, they are ready to be examined and admired afresh by more people than ever before.

n otes 1 Nonomura Ninsei occupies a prominent place within Japanese art history: he was a master potter to whom is attributed the establishment of the reputation of Kyoto ceramics, which lasted for subsequent centuries. First and foremost, his aesthetic of elegance – as well as his connection to court nobles and the tea practice of chanoyu – has made him one of the most representative Japanese potters past or present. For detail of the tea bowl by Ninsei, see pages 104–6.

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2 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, 3. 3 The five pieces were export ware (“Invoices: Porcelains, Bric-a-brac, Painting, Etchings.” Box-Folder 13-1, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives). Van Horne was one of the earliest collectors in North America who focused on Japanese ceramics. 4 For details on the Van Horne notebooks, see pages 109–19. 5 Earle, “The Taxonomic Obsession,” 864. Also Ter Keurs, Colonial Collections Revisited, 4. 6 For example, see Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 296. 7 Tilley, “Introduction: Victorian Tactile Imagination,” 1. 8 Van Horne’s letter to Sir Edward Clouston, dated 31 January 1912 (Box-Folder 3-25, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives). 9 According to one Montreal historian, Van Horne could never “be persuaded to buy a painting he did not like, though a dealer might urge it upon him, saying that it was a bargain, and rare, and well worth having.” Collard, Montreal Yesterdays, 256. 10 E.S. Morse and H. Shugio were the other two. Van Horne wrote their names on the front page of one of his catalogues, “Notes on Japanese pottery and Porcelain in the Collection of W.C. Van Horne.” Box-Folder 9-1, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives. 11 Akusawa is the Japanese man in the painting of the Van Horne family in Japanese dress (see fig. 3.1). 12 Shugio was the manager of the New York branch of Kiryū Kōshō Kaisha (The First Japanese Manufacturing and Trading Company) between 1880 and 1889, and temporarily stayed in Washington, dc, in 1893. 13 Van Horne’s letter to Sir Edward Clouston, dated 31 January 1912. See note 8. 14 Ninagawa published seven volumes of Kwan-ko-dzu-setsu, also known as Kanko Zusetsu: tōki no bu (Illustrated Review of Old Things: Section of Ceramics) in 1876–79, with hand-coloured lithograph illustrations. These were quickly translated into French and English and immediately became the major source of information for Western collectors of Japanese ceramics. 15 Thanks to Morse’s enthusiasm and meticulousness, his collection contains some types of objects that can no longer be found today, even in Japan. 16 Morse, Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery, iv. 17 Ibid. 18 Meiji Japan: The Edward Sylvester Morse Collection. The Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, File 14-7. 19 Morse meticulously documented everyday life in Japan before it was transformed by Western modernization. His ethnographical observations of Japan were published as Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings in 1886, and Japan Day by Day: 1877, 1878–79, 1882–83, in 1890. He also collected a number of ethnographical objects in Japan, which are now housed in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. In Morse’s obituary, Poultney Bigelow (1855–1954) refers him as “a grand good friend of Japan” and “a biographer of Japanese everyday life,” who made every effort to preserve meticulous details (qtd. in Ōta, 197–8; my translation). 20 Van Horne noted in the catalogue that these thirty-four pieces were purchased with Morse’s stamp of approval. This demonstrates the relationship among Morse, Matsuki, and Van Horne at the time.

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21 Sharf, “Bunkio Matsuki,” 144. 22 Hirayama, “Curious Merchandise,” 222. 23 Van Horne bought a few Japanese ceramics at Bing’s first sale in New York in 1894, the only occasion on which he made a purchase from this dealer. Similarly, Van Horne’s sole purchase from Hayashi was around 1903, when he bought eight pieces. 24 Correspondences between Van Horne and Matsuki around 1912 to 1914. Box-Folder 5-2, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives. 25 Matsuki’s attempts to become an art dealer, however, failed, and he had major financial problems in the early twentieth century. Lawton, Freer, 108. 26 The interest of the author was, however, more in the decorative quality of export ware than in the hundreds of domestic types. Rood, “Sir William Van Horne and Some Canadian Art Collectors.” 27 “Sir William Van Horne’s Collection of Japanese Pottery,” Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors 34 (September-December 1912): 9–14. 28 Denys Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry, vol. 1 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), 275. 29 Wassermann, “Canada’s Finest Art Collection”; Edmonstone, “The end of our greatest private art collection”; Berton, “The Pacific Canadian Railway”; and Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan, 297. 30 Klose, Wilhelm von Bode – Otto Kümmel: Briefwechsel aus 20 Jaheren, 1905–1925. (Facts and Opinions: The First Twenty Years of East Asian Arts in Berlin), (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2009), 149. 31 Freer established his Japanese art collection with advice from Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), curator and the leading art historian of Japanese art, and tended to be highly selective when acquiring objects. Van Horne, on the contrary, purchased Japanese ceramics in bulk, whatever was available from dealers. 32 The Royal Ontario Museum was established in 1914 and originally consisted of five museums: the Royal Ontario Museums of Archaeology, Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Zoology, and Geology. They were unified in 1955. 33 A daughter of William C.C. by his first marriage inherited little else but Van Horne’s New Brunswick summer home (“Ministers Island”) and its contents, including a large number of Japanese ceramics. Ministers Island was sold in 1960, and then purchased by the Province of New Brunswick in 1977 to be designated as a National Historic Site. The contents were, however, scattered. 34 These 184 pieces included the 139 that had been donated by Van Horne himself in the 1910s, thirty-four tea bowls selected by Currelly, and another eleven Satsuma-type pieces, also donated by William C.C. in 1944. The details of donation of the last group are not known. 35 From the author’s interviews, conducted between August and October 2014, with Sara Irwin, former technician of Far Eastern collections, Jeanie Parker, former slide-collection technician, Patty Proctor, former curator of Chinese ceramics, and Dr Klaas Ruitenbeek, former Louis Harley Stone Chair of Far Eastern Art and the senior curator of Chinese art. 36 Memorandum by Wylie regarding the Van Horne ceramic collection, not dated, but after

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May 1991, quoting Wylie’s letter to the editor of the rom’s magazine, dated 14 May 1991. Hugh Wylie Files, rom. 37 Ibid. It should be noted that earthenware is generally considered coarser and less refined than stoneware. 38 According to Irwin, due to various troubles and difficulties during the transitional period from the card to electronic cataloguing system at the rom in the late 1980s, it was completely up to individual curators whether or not to use the new system at that time.

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Akiko Takesue

The Ninsei Tea Bowl

A tea bowl made by Nonomura Ninsei (active ca 1646–1677) from the Van Horne collection, now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum (rom), has had a checkered life, going from genuine to copy, from copy to genuine. Ninsei is one of the most renowned potters in Japanese art history. His aesthetic of elegance – as well as his connection to court nobles and the tea practice of chanoyu – helped establish the reputation of Kyoto ceramics for centuries. Many of his pieces are designated National Treasures in Japan. Today a single original Ninsei piece can elevate the quality of a museum’s entire Japanese collection. Ninsei’s fame was not instant. It arose gradually both in Japan and in the West from the late-nineteenth century, when Japanese domestic ceramics became popular for Western collectors. By the 1890s, Ninsei was esteemed as a “national potter” by Western collectors, although few had a solid idea about his authentic works, because of the unavailability of actual pieces. In addition, because of his renown, countless copies and counterfeits were made and distributed. Sir William Van Horne owned a total of twenty-four pieces attributed to Ninsei, although his attitude toward them kept fluctuating. In the early days, he acquired five “Ninsei pieces” for high prices. His informants were, however, rather negative about their authenticity, which apparently dampened Van Horne’s interest in acquiring any more Ninsei pieces for a while. Some of them were even removed from the collection. Though Van Horne purchased several

pieces attributed to Ninsei from 1897 onwards, he did not seem to have sought them eagerly. Among those that Van Horne acquired from Matsuki Bunkio in 1897 was a simple tea bowl in the style of a Korean rice bowl, with an impressed mark of “Ninsei.” Van Horne’s interest in this tea bowl was minor: its descriptions in his catalogue were minimal; and there is no trace of any further investigation, unlike many other entries that were repeatedly overwritten with informants’ comments over the years (fig. 12.3). Its importance was certainly not as high as one would expect today. The Ninsei tea bowl was donated to the rom in 1944 by Van Horne’s grandson. The museum’s cataloguing records indicate that it was not considered genuine, and more than sixty years passed before its authenticity was re-examined. Because the Van Horne collection was focused on the classifiable aspect of Japanese ceramics, there was an assumption that “there cannot be a real Ninsei in the Van Horne collection.”1 The piece’s reputation changed dramatically in 2007, when Professor Oka Yoshiko of Ōtemae University in Hyōgo, Japan, an acknowledged expert on Ninsei and his works, was visiting Toronto.2 She carefully examined the tea bowl in the rom’s storage and confirmed that it was indeed a genuine Ninsei. Since then, it has been recognized as a treasure in the rom’s Japanese collection, beautiful in its own right and significant in terms of Sir William Van Horne’s donations.

Figures 12.1, 12.2 Nonomura Ninsei, Chawan (tea bowl), Kyoto ware, late-17th c., stoneware. Photo credit: Brian Boyle © Royal Ontario Museum, 944.16.24.

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Figure 12.3 Sir William Van Horne, Catalogue of Japanese Pottery: Collection of W. Van Horne, 1893, mixed media on paper. William Van Horne Fund, Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

n otes 1 From interviews conducted between August and October 2014 with Sara Irwin, former technician of Far Eastern collections; Jeanie Parker, former slide-collection technician; Patty Proctor, former curator of Chinese ceramics; and Dr Klaas Ruitenbeek, former Louis Harley Stone Chair of Far Eastern Art and the senior curator of Chinese art. 2 Professor Oka’s publications include: Kinsei Kyōyaki no Kenkyū (Studies of Kyoto Ware in the Early Modern Period) (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2011); and Kokuhō Ninsei no Nazo (The Myth of Ninsei, the National Treasure) (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2001).

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Part Two

Akiko Takesue

Van Horne s Notebooks

Sir William Van Horne kept seven volumes of handwritten, personally illustrated notebooks of his Japanese ceramics collection, now preserved in the archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago). Since the actual objects remaining today in the holdings of the Royal Ontario Museum (rom) and the mmfa represent only one-quarter of Van Horne’s acquisitions, these catalogues, notes, and lists provide a useful insight into his entire collection. They clearly indicate that his primary passion lay in researching individual pieces and identifying their types and the regional kilns where they were made. This trait was especially conspicuous during the peak period of his collecting in the decade between 1893 and 1903. The volumes are organized according to his own numbering system, based on the acquisition date (except for the first ninety pieces). Each piece is assigned a Van Horne number, accompanied by a brief description, the source and the date of acquisition, cost, comments by other people, and a small illustration drawn by Van Horne himself, either in black and white or in colour, though the kinds of information vary from notebook to notebook. The final Van Horne number, 1547, does not necessarily correspond to the exact total number of pieces that he possessed.1 Nor do the Van Horne numbers always correspond to the chronological order of acquisition, because he repeatedly renewed, renumbered, and re-organized his collection.

Figure 13.1 Sir William Van Horne, Notebook “D.B.” (Catalogue of Japanese Pottery Collection of W. Van Horne, 1 January 1893) mixed media on paper. William Van Horne Fund, Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

The Van Horne numbers were recorded not only in the notebooks, but also on the objects themselves, with paper stickers. Some objects have two stickers, one pink and the other white, bearing different numbers. The pink ones correspond to the Van Horne numbers in the notebooks, and were probably applied on the objects by Van Horne himself. The white stickers were most likely applied when the collection was divided by Van Horne’s heirs in 1944. Some objects also bear inscribed numbers in red or white pigment, with the numbers corresponding to those in the catalogues and on the pink stickers. The seven notebooks can be classified and described as follows: 1. Four working catalogues, fully illustrated, consecutive.2 • The first, titled “D.B.,” dated 1 January 1893, contains items numbered 1 to 719 in 174 pages, with black-and-white illustrations. It records acquisitions from 1892 to 1897, but also includes a considerable number of non-dated acquisitions, presumably earlier than 1892. • The second, titled “A.B.,” not dated, contains items numbered 727 to 1265 in 120 pages, with black-and-white illustrations. It records acquisitions from 1898 to 1899.

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• The third, not titled or dated, contains items numbered 1267 to 1331, in 24 pages, with black-and-white illustrations. It records acquisitions from 1900 to 1901. • The fourth, titled “C.B.,” dated 1903, contains items numbered 1332 to 1547 in 72 pages, with colour illustrations. The recorded dates are mainly from 1902 to 1905, but many items are without acquisition dates, with random insertions of earlier acquisitions in 1890, 1892, 1894, and 1895. 2. One working notebook, titled “Notes on Japanese pottery and Porcelain in the Collection of W. Van Horne,” not dated but likely started in late 1892, partially illustrated, not complete.3 The Van Horne numbers in this catalogue (1–858) mostly correspond with the first and second catalogues mentioned above. Although these three volumes were likely produced around the same time, there are discrepancies in the information on certain pieces, nor does this version include the source and date of acquisition, cost, or illustration. As it is also heavily revised, tracking all the revisions is almost impossible, and it appears that, while trying to catalogue the same objects in different versions, Van Horne did not maintain full coherence. 3. One fair copy, titled “List of Japanese ceramics,” not dated but possibly 1895– 96, partially illustrated in colour, incomplete.4 This volume contains the Van Horne numbers from 1 to 686, out of which 380 pieces are recorded in detail. The descriptions are simple and short, written in larger and clearer letters, with purchase costs. Considering the format, Van Horne might have intended this to be a good version of all the catalogues. Entries are not consistent, however, and only a small part of his collection is inventoried in this version. 4. One fair copy, not dated, without illustrations, incomplete.5 This volume contains the Van Horne numbers from 1 to 1280, organized by the source of acquisition or the name of dealer. The price of each item follows, and the description of the piece remains minimal. The order of the recording is not entirely chronological: it starts with the items numbered 1 to 199, jumps to the numbers 921 to 1280 (the pieces acquired from Yamanaka and Co.), and then comes back to the number 200. While the reason for this order is not known, this version might have been recorded around 1900, when Van Horne frequently dealt with Yamanaka, and be intended strictly for the purpose of inventory, rather than for his research.

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n otes 1 Based on the number of pieces recorded in the inventory presumably taken shortly after his death in 1915, it is safe to say that his collection consisted of about twelve hundred items in total. “Inventory of the artistic property and furnishings contained in the residence of the late Sir William Van Horne, 513 Sherbrooke Street.” Box-Folder 7-1, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives. 2 The first and second volumes are now in the mmfa archive; and the third and fourth are in the ago archive (Box-Folders 9-4 and 12-2, Van Horne Family Fonds). 3 Box-Folder 9-1, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives 4 Box-Folder 9-2, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives. 5 Box-Folder 10-3, Van Horne Family Fonds, ago Archives.

Figures 13.2(1), 13.2(2) Opposite Sir William Van Horne, Notebook “A.B.” (Catalogue of Japanese Pottery Collection of W. Van Horne), 1893, mixed media on paper. William Van Horne Fund, Archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

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Figure 13.3 William Van Horne, Van Horne Catalogue “Satsuma,” ca 1876, 20 ! 13.5 ! 1 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S3.4. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 13.4 William Van Horne, Catalogue “C.B.,” ca 1876, 26 ! 21 ! 3.5 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S3.12. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 13.5 Above William Van Horne, Notes on Japanese Pottery and Porcelain in the Collection of W. Van Horne, 1880–1899, 21.5 ! 17 ! 3 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S3.1. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 13.7 Above William Van Horne, Van Horne Catalogue “Akusawa,” 1900s, 33.5 ! 21.5 ! 2 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S3.8. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Figure 13.6 Overleaf William Van Horne, Van Horne Catalogue “Ki-Seto,” ca 1900, 26.5 ! 22.6 ! 3.2 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001, LA.VHF.S3.2. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

Ceramics Catalogue Akiko Takesue, in consultation with Louise Cort This catalogue includes ceramics from Van Horne’s collection that are now held in public and private collections. These objects represent approximately 30 percent of his original collection. A small number of the pieces acquired by Van Horne that were thought to originate from Japan have now been reattributed to Chinese and Korean kilns. Objects are ordered by the inventory numbers in Van Horne’s notebooks.

Plate 1 | VH 17 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 5.8 ! 7.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.59 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 2 | VH 29 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Edo period, 17c.–18c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.75 ! 6.05 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.45 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 3 | VH 41 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Possibly Takatori ware Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.3 ! 6.04 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.50 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 4 | Possibly VH 47 Cylindrical tea caddy with cream glaze Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 10.7 ! 5.99 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.41 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 5 | VH 47 Rough double-gourd-shaped tea caddy Possibly Kyushu | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.4 ! 7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.77 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 6 | VH 69 Double-gourd-shaped tea caddy Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.6 ! 5.1 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.18 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 7 | VH 87 Tea caddy with mottled dark-brown glaze Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.7 ! 5.88 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.22a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 8 | VH 91 / 262 Hemispherical tea bowl with slightly everted rim Karatsu ware Saga | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware | 8.3 ! 12.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.46 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 9 | VH 92 / 263 Tea bowl with dark-brown glaze over white slip Takatori or Agano ware Fukuoka | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 11 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.27 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 10 | VH 98 / VH 358 Bulbous tea caddy with shiny amber glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 9.3 ! 8.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.69.1-.2 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 11 | VH 107 Tea caddy with large mouth Takatori style Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.8 ! 2.23 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.61 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 12 | VH 107 / VH 371 / VH 1363 Raku Ryōnyū (1756–1834) Black Raku tea bowl with design of Mt Fuji Kyoto | Edo period, late 18c. to early 19c. Earthenware | 8.3 ! 13.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.9 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 13 | VH 112 Tea caddy of maru-tsubo (round-jar) shape Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.7 ! 7.24 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.30 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 14 | VH 113 Tea caddy with shibugami-type mat glaze Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.45 ! 6.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.71 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 15 | VH 118 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.30 ! 6.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.53 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 16 | VH 136 Round tea caddy with dark-brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8 ! 7.08 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.26 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 17 | VH 149 Attributed to Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743) Tea caddy with design of blossoming plum branch Kyoto | Edo period, early 18c. Stoneware | 6.8 ! 4.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.17a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 18 | VH 167 / VH 1172 Round teapot with polychrome floral decoration Imari style, Hizen ware Saga | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 11.5 ! 19 ! 11.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.16 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 19 | VH 182 / VH 448 / VH 655 Tea bowl with design of peonies and vines Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo-Meiji period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 6.1 ! 12.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.1 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 20 | VH 198 Tea caddy with pale blue-grey glaze Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7 ! 7.35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.28 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 21 | VH 199 / VH 1387 Square sake ewer with landscape design Imari style, Hizen ware Saga | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 15.1 ! 15.45 ! 7.75 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.103a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 22 | VH 201 Globular incense burner decorated with polychrome enamels and gold Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; silver | 21 ! 9.5 ! 18.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.11 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 23 | VH 213 Round incense burner with design of flowers and shishi lion Satsuma style, Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 11.5 ! 12 ! 12 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.8.1-.2 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 24 | VH 218 Bulbous vase with straight neck Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 18.5 ! 20.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.7 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 25 | VH 224 Rectangular incense burner with four feet Satsuma style, Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware; silver | 11.2 ! 8 ! 7.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.5 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 26 | VH 227 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape with shibugami-type mat glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 10.6 ! 7.16 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.74 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 27 | VH 238 Offering cup on a stand Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.65 ! 10.12 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.112 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 28 | VH 243 Shallow sake cup with Tokugawa family crest Satsuma style, Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 2.2 ! 10.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.4 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 29 | VH 247 Serving dish in the shape of a flying crane White Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 4.6 ! 24.95 ! 13 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.87 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 30 | VH 257 Tripod incense burner with floral and geometrical patterns Awata ware Kyoto | Edo period, late 17c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 7.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.120 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 31 | VH 276 Incense burner in the shape of a sitting cat Awata ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 12.5 ! 17 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 32 | VH 277 Round sake bottle with floral design Ko-Kiyomizu style Kyoto | Edo period, end of 17c. Stoneware | 13.5 ! 14.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.33 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 33 | VH 297 Tea bowl with design of maple tree and a hanging pot Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.3 ! 14.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.43 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 34 | VH 302 Vessel in the shape of mokugyo (Buddhist gong) Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Meiji period, 1880s Earthenware | 17.7 ! 20.5 ! 16.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 2016.299 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 35 | VH 303 Deep dish decorated with polychrome enamels and gold Imari style, Hizen ware Saga | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Porcelain | 7.4 ! 27.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 946x44.1 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 36 | VH 306 / VH 1304 Large black tea bowl with design of hollyhock Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 18c. Stoneware | 9.1 ! 14.29 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.47 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 37 | VH 307 Pitcher with brown-and-green glaze Kyoto-related kiln Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 19 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 38 | VH 313 / VH 1238 Tea bowl with floral design in dark blue Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, late 18c. to 19c. Earthenware | 8.6 ! 11.98 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.66 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 39 | VH 319 / VH 1479 Attributed to Kashū Minpei (1796–1871) Leaf tea caddy with matching lid decorated with flowers Awaji, Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 11.6 ! 6.85 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.16 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 40 | VH 322 | VH 1298 Tea bowl with design of baton Kyoto ware Kyoto | False seal of “Ninsei” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.7 ! 12.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.6 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 41 | VH 326 Square serving bowl with design of grasses Awata ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.30 ! 7.50 ! 6.25 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.35 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 42 | VH 335 Semi-ovoid tea bowl with green glaze at mouth rim Agano ware Fukuoka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8 ! 12.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.2 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 43 | VH 336 / VH 1539 Tea bowl with design of red spiny lobster Kyoto ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 6.4 ! 11.38 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.56 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 44 | VH 341 Tea bowl with a green splash over thick white glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.8 ! 12.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.88 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 45 | VH 342 / VH 1203 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854) or Wazen (1823–1896) Blue-and-white bowl or incense burner with landscape design Kyoto | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 7.75 ! 10.84 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.1 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 46 | VH 345 Eiraku (generation unknown) Small round tea bowl without footring Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.8 ! 10.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.31 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 47 | VH 348 Tea bowl with design of cranes and pine leaves Awata ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 8 ! 12.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.13 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 48 | VH 358 / VH 1359 Tea bowl with high foot Busan ware, Gohon type Korea | Choson dynasty, second half of 17c. Stoneware | 9.6 ! 12.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.97 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 49 | VH 362 Square plate with design of bamboo Kyoto ware, Kenzan style Kyoto | Edo period, mid 18c. Stoneware | 4.2 ! 23.4 ! 24.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.15 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 50 | VH 379 Serving bowl with green glaze Possibly Banko ware Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 7 ! 11.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.11 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 51 | VH 389 Tea storage jar with high neck and three lugs Takeo Karatsu ware Saga | Edo period, 17c. to early 18c. Stoneware | 25.65 ! 21.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.106a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 52 | VH 394 Sake ewer with rat-shaped spout and cat-shaped lid knob Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 16.5 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 53 | VH 402 / VH 1464 Small tea bowl with running horses Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.9 ! 12.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.58 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 54 | VH 404 Hemispherical tea bowl in Korean style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 12.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.3 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 55 | VH 406 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854) Tall water jar with lid with flared knob Kyoto | Edo period, early to mid 19c. Stoneware | 19.7 ! 15.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.104a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 56 | VH 411 Large sake bottle with design of three kicking horses Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 44.2 ! 24.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.88 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 57 | VH 412 Irregularly shaped tea bowl with cream and green glazes Seto ware Akazu, Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 11.6 ! 15 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.45 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 58 | VH 414 Red Raku shallow tea bowl Unknown Raku workshop False seal of “Raku” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 6.7 ! 13.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.16 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 59 | VH 415 Large sake bottle with black and brown decoration Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 24.55 ! 13.33 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.86 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 60 | VH 416 Tea bowl half-covered with mustard-colour glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.8 ! 13.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.1 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 61 | VH 469 / VH 1277 Attributed to Ogata Ihachi (Kenzan II) (act. ca 1720–1760) Rectangular dish with design of irises Kyoto | Edo period, 18c. Earthenware | 2.9 ! 42.5 ! 8.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.46 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 62 | VH 470 Large sake bottle with letters of “fuku” and “Ju” Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 37.5 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 63 | VH 474 Takahashi Dōhachi III (1811–1879) Black Raku tea bowl with design of crane and turtle Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 1840–1879 Earthenware | 9.4 ! 10.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.4 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 64 | VH 479 Double-gourd-shaped water jar with dints Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, possibly late 17c. Stoneware; lacquered wood | 18.7 ! 18.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.89a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 65 | VH 483 Small cylindrical container with wooden lid Kyoto ware Kyoto | False seal of “Ninsei” | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; wood | 9.2 ! 6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.42 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 66 | VH 483 / (originally VH 129) Sake bottle with long neck and a spout Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 18.3 ! 14 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.122 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 67 | VH 485 Conical tea bowl with greenish-brown glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 13.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.20 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 68 | VH 490 Inoue Ryōsai II (1845–1905) Sake bottle with moulded porcelain figures of three boys Imado ware Tokyo | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware; porcelain | 22 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 69 | VH 510 / VH 1493 Sake bottle with a tiny appliqué of Hotei (Budai, or Laughing Buddha) Tamba ware Hyogo | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 18.8 ! 8.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.84 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 70 | VH 515 Tea bowl with green glaze around the rim Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.3 ! 13.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.22 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 71 | VH 519 Sitting figure of Otafuku (plump, cheery woman) Kyoto or Ishikawa | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 20.8 ! 27.5 ! 21.55 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.96 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 72 | VH 521 Long-neck vase with a dragon in high relief Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 22.4 ! 9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.48 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 73 | VH 529 / VH 1740 Black serving bowl with heavy white glaze Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8.7 ! 11.16 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.92 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 74 | VH 542 Vase in the shape of kine (pestle) in Oribe style Seto ware Akazu, Aichi | Marked “Shuntan” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 25.5 ! 10.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.97 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 75 | VH 545 Sake bottle with floral patterns in brown Kosobe ware Osaka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 15.1 ! 10 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.50 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 76 | VH 582 Tea bowl with flaring mouth and white slip decorations Karatsu style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.2 ! 13.34 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.26 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 77 | VH 584 / VH 1295 Nin’ami Dōhachi (1783–1855) Squarish serving bowl with design of flowered vine Kyoto | Edo period, first half of 19c. Stoneware | 8.5 ! 14.1 ! 14.15 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.98 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 78 | VH 600 Small ovoid jar with inverted mouth rim Possibly Chinese | Dates unknown Stoneware | 4.4 ! 6.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.123 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 79 | VH 601 Tea bowl with floral design on blue background Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.2 ! 11.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.12.12 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 80 | VH 610 Squat double-gourd-shaped sake bottle with incised whorl Ōhi ware Kanazawa | Meiji period, late 19c. Earthenware | 11.6 ! 9.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.70 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 81 | VH 611 / VH 1772 Katō Shuntan (d.1807) Sake offering bottle for shrine Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, late 18c. to beginning of 19c. Stoneware | 20.85 ! 12.75 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.94 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 82 | VH 620 Kinkodō Kamesuke (1765–1837) Figure of poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro Sanda ware Hyōgo | Edo period, 1825 Porcelain | 17.1 ! 19.2 ! 12.15 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.90 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 83 | VH 621 Small tea bowl with design of pine tree and crane Awata ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 9.3 ! 9.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.33 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 84 | VH 629 Tall vase in Sawankhalok style Tateno style, Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 27.3 ! 13 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.36 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 85 | VH 630 Tea bowl with polychrome landscape design Kyoto style | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 6.8 ! 13.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.86 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 86 | VH 633 Double-gourd-shaped sake bottle with design of a vine Seto ware, Ofuke type Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 17.2 ! 17.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.44 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 87 | VH 642 Small tea bowl with incised letters Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 6.9 ! 9.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.30 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 88 | VH 656 / VH 1269 Tea bowl with design of pine and plum Kyoto ware Kyoto | False seal of “Ninsei” | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8.7 ! 8.26 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.11 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 89 | VH 667 Nonomura Ninsei (act. ca. 1646–1677) Rounded square tea bowl with flowing glaze Kyoto | Edo period, mid 17c. Stoneware | 8.1 ! 13.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.24 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 90 | VH 678 Black Raku tea bowl with willow tree and letters in white Kyoto | False signature of “Kenzan” | Edo period, early 19c. Earthenware | 8.4 ! 9.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.33 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 91 | VH 691 Serving bowl with design of Chinese bellflower Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.3 ! 11.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.7 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 92 | VH 703 Tea bowl with green and blue decoration over brown glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.3 ! 12.9 ! 12.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.34 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 93 | VH 711 Tea bowl with polychrome floral and ornamental patterns Kyoto style | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 5.9 ! 13.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.4 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 94 | VH 712 Double-gourd-shaped sake bottle with small blue neck Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware | 16 ! 11.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 955x126 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 95 | VH 715 Tea bowl with thick black-and-white glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.7 ! 10.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.61 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 96 | VH 725 Irregularly formed bowl with several dents Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 12.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.32 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 97 | VH 727 Hemispherical tea bowl with irregularly shaped mouth Busan ware, Gohon type Korea | Choson dynasty, mid 17c. Stoneware Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.72 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 98 | VH 728 Large white tea bowl with six spur marks inside Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 18.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.125 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 99 | VH 733 Tea bowl with brush-painted white slip Busan ware, Gohon type Korea | Choson dynasty, first half of 17c. Stoneware | 8.9 ! 13.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.73 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 100 | VH 737 / VH 1801 Eiraku Tokuzen (1852–1909) Covered water jar with polychrome flowers and square patterns Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 21 ! 13 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.83a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 101 | VH 740 Raku-type tea bowl with horizontal shaved lines Hagiyama ware Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 9.4 ! 12.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.17 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 102 | VH 748 Cylindrical tea bowl with inlaid white-slip decorations Possibly Yatsushiro ware | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 12.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.29 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 103 | VH 753 Oval vase with two tiny ears Kyoto-related kiln Kansai area | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 12.2 ! 8.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.115 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 104 | VH 755 Rectangular plate with design of a bird and branches Arita ware, Kutani type Saga | Edo period, 1650s–1660s Porcelain | 2.5 ! 13.5 ! 11.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.77 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 105 | VH 785 / VH 1002 Incense burner in the shape of a dove Ōhi ware Ishikawa | Edo period, mid 19c. Earthenware | 14.05 ! 23.6 ! 10.85 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.24a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 106 | VH 794 Large tubular jar with dripping white glaze Shōdai ware Kumamoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 22.5 ! 14.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.82 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 107 | VH 796 Totoki Hoshō (act. early 19th century) Sake bottle with design of peonies and feather-like grasses Agano ware | Fukuoka | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 24.7 ! 14.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.24 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 108 | VH 803 Ovoid jar with design of birds and turtle Arita ware, Ko-Imari style Saga | Edo period, mid 17c. Porcelain | 24.4 ! 11 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.2 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 109 | VH 806 Cylindrical jar with everted mouth Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 11.5 ! 10.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.75 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 110 | VH 813 Sake bottle with straight-cut body and long neck Kyoto-related kiln Kansai area | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 16 ! 7.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.100 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 111 | VH 816 Raku-type tea bowl with slightly constricted body Kōrakuen ware Tokyo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 7.5 ! 11.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.28 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 112 | VH 828 Miura Ken’ya (1821–1889) Portable incense burner in the shape of a lotus Tokyo | Edo-Meiji period, 1850s–1889 Stoneware | 12.6 ! 25 ! 9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 2014.157.1-2 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 113 | VH 830 Large sake bottle with inscriptions in silver lacquer Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 27.4 ! 18 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.58 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 114 | VH 836 Sake bottle in tea-whisk shape Arita ware, early Imari style Saga | Edo period, 1650s–1660s Porcelain | 25.8 ! 13.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.18 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 115 | VH 839 Elongated conical vase Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 38.7 ! 10.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.59 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 116 | VH 840 Tripod vase standing on three karako (Chinese children) Seto style False seal of “Shunrin” | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 30.9 ! 18 ! 18.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.31 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 117 | VH 851 Large bowl with sketchy pattern in underglaze blue Kansai area | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 8.8 ! 20.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.96 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Akiko Takesue with Louise Cort

Plate 118 | VH 860 Raku tea bowl with stencilled maple leaves False seal of “Kōraku” | Meiji period, late 19c. Earthenware | 6.9 ! 13.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.48 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 119 | VH 863 Water jar with high foot Takeo Karatsu ware Saga | Edo period, 18c. Stoneware | 18.7 ! 18.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.54a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 120 | VH 865 Red Raku tea bowl with scratched design Unkown Raku workshop | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Earthenware | 9.15 ! 14.1 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.69 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 121 | VH 871 Tea bowl with six indentations on sides Shidoro ware Shizuoka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 9.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.56 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 122 | VH 872 Hand-moulded hanging vase Kakitsubata ware Aichi | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 13.30 ! 8.09 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.107 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 123 | VH 874 Double-gourd-shaped sake bottle with white slip decoration Tamba ware Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 16 ! 9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.23 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 124 | VH 885 Tea bowl with wheel ridges and mat brown glaze Shidoro style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.7 ! 10.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.55 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 125 | VH 887 Double-gourd-shaped sake bottle with dark-brown glaze Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 23.2 ! 12.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.20 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 126 | VH 897 / VH 1459 Okuda Mokuhaku (1800–1871) Sake cup rinse bowl mounted on a stand with t hree figures Akahada ware | Nara | Edo period, mid 19c. Porcelain | 11.6 ! 13.42 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.21 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Ceramics Catalogue

Plate 127 | VH 901 Irregularly modelled sake bottle Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 19 ! 9.3 ! 10.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.79 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 128 | VH 903 / VH 1725 Small, square candy bottle with design of birds Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.9 ! 6.5 ! 6.25 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.64 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 129 | VH 904 Tea bowl with landscape design Possibly Kansai area | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8.70 ! 10.78 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.108 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 130 | VH 905 Figure of Hotei (Budai, or Laughing Buddha) Fushimi ware Kyoto | Signed “Kōemon” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 14.3 ! 26.1 ! 19 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.110 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 131 | VH 906 Figure of Fukusuke Fushimi ware Kyoto | Signed “Kōemon” Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 20.3 ! 20.8 ! 16.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.109 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 132 | VH 915 Spherical water jar with wheel ridges Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, late 17c. Stoneware | 17.9 ! 19.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.41 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 133 | VH 922 / VH 1201 Eiraku Wazen (1823–1896) or Tokuzen (1852–1909) Bowl with diaper and leaf design in gold and black Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 7.35 ! 11.35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.3 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 134 | VH 928 White tea bowl in Korean style Kiyomizu ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 5.25 ! 13.97 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.110 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 135 | VH 930 Screen holder in the shape of a mandarin duck Uzurayama ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 15.5 ! 15.8 ! 20.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.63 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Akiko Takesue with Louise Cort

Plate 136 | VH 931 Eiraku Tokuzen (1871–1909) Cylindrical tea bowl with design of pine tree Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8 ! 10 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.31 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 137 | VH 936 Tea bowl in Gohon type Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.1 ! 11.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 946x44.2 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 138 | VH 938 Probably Ōhi Kanbē (1779–1856) Raku small tea bowl with standing crane Ōhi ware Ishikawa | Edo period, 19c. Earthenware | 9.5 ! 10.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.19 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 139 | VH 948 Incense burner with two simulated ring handles Seto style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.8 ! 10.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.95 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 140 | VH 954 / VH 1894 Serving bowl with green glaze Antō ware Mie | Edo period, late 18c. to 19c. Stoneware | 10.7 ! 23.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.49 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 141 | VH 975 Bowl for sweets in Chinese Jun-ware style Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.1 ! 14.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.104 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 142 | VH 984 Ovoid sake bottle with turquoise glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 21.4 ! 12.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.93 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 143 | VH 989 Vase with long neck with spreading mouth Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 25.5 ! 8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.76 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 144 | VH 994 / VH 1338 Black Raku tea bowl with design of horse Kyoto ware Kyoto | Seal of “Murasakino” | Edo period, mid 19c. Earthenware | 9.3 ! 11.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.16 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Ceramics Catalogue

Plate 145 | VH 995 / VH 1243 Ogata Shūhei (1788–1839) Tea bowl decorated with a scene from a kabuki play Kyoto | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 8.5 ! 14.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.20 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 146 | VH 1004 Red Raku tea bowl with carved image of Mount Fuji Marked “Yūko” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 7.7 ! 12.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.13 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 147 | VH 1010 Takahashi Dōhachi I (1742–1804) or II (1783–1855) Red Raku tea bowl with standing crane Kyoto | Edo period, late 18c to early 19c Earthenware | 9.5 ! 10.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.14 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 148 | VH 1015 / VH 1538 Tripod incense burner with polychrome decoration Kutani ware Ishikawa | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain; metal | 7.2 ! 8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.76a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 149 | VH 1017 / VH 1045 Serving bowl with low-relief horse Sōma ware Fukushima | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8.1 ! 10.03 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.12 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 150 | VH 1020 Vase with long neck and two handles Kosobe ware Osaka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 27.5 ! 12.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.51 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 151 | VH 1027 / VH 1332 Small Raku container in the shape of a kinchaku (purse) Edo period, 18c.–19c. Earthenware | 6.25 ! 6.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.70 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 152 | VH 1031 / VH 1256 Kinkōzan (Probably VI: 1823–1884) Incense burner with animal-shaped legs and handles Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 8.65 ! 17.75 ! 15.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.39 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 153 | VH 1032 Rounded pentagonal plate in light brown Minato ware Osaka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 3.8 ! 19.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.53 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Akiko Takesue with Louise Cort

Plate 154 | VH 1033 / VH 1223 Figure of Kannon (Guanyin) False seal of “Aoki Mokubei” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 21.95 ! 7.1 ! 9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.59 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 155 | VH 1042 Tea cup with incised white slip decoration Banko ware Nara | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 9.2 ! 8.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.12 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 156 | VH 1043 Long-necked sake bottle with indentations on the sides Tamba ware Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 32.2 ! 7.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.22 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 157 | VH 1045 Takahashi Dōhachi III (1811–1879) or IV (1845–1897) Tea bowl with design of a hundred immortals Kyoto | Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 11.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.68 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 158 | VH 1048 / VH 1455 Tea bowl in Irabo style Akahada ware Nara | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.5 ! 13.36 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.113 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 159 | VH 1056 / VH 1436 Square incense burner on four feet Kotō ware Shiga | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 10.4 ! 8.95 ! 8.88 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.71 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 160 | VH 1063 Bulbous sake bottle with brown glaze over white slip Kosobe ware Osaka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 15 ! 9.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.35 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 161 | VH 1070 Mori Yūsetsu (1808–1882) Water ewer in European-style shape Banko ware Nara | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Earthenware | 23.5 ! 22.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.5 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 162 | VH 1092 / VH 1206 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854) Tea bowl in Annan (Vietnamese) style Kyoto | Edo period, first half of 19c. Earthenware | 9.40 ! 10.85 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.2 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Ceramics Catalogue

Plate 163 | VH 1096 Black Raku tea bowl with flying white crane Kyoto ware, Kenzan style Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.3 ! 12.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.41 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 164 | VH 1103 / VH 1354 Red Raku tea bowl with design of horsetails Unkown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 9.6 ! 10.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.70 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 165 | VH 1108 / VH 1222 Incense container in the shape of a crane Unknown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.5 ! 11.9 ! 5.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.29a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 166 | VH 1114 Tea bowl with scratched vertical lines Busan ware, Gohon type Korea | Choson dynasty, early 18c. Stoneware | 8.2 ! 11.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.67 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 167 | VH 1140 Figure of tortoise Bizen ware Okayama | Signed “Tōraku” | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 11.2 ! 38 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.39 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 168 | VH 1143 / VH 1135 Bowl with a golden-yellow fringe decoration Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.80 ! 11.09 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.61 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 169 | VH 1148 Vase with two ear handles covered with wheel ridges Kikkō ware Osaka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 23.2 ! 9.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.84 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 170 | VH 1157 Red Raku tea bowl with green glaze Unkown Raku workshop | Edo period, early 19c. Earthenware | 8.5 ! 12.15 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.68 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 171 | VH 1159 Tall cylindrical vase with two ring handles Maiko ware Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 37.2 ! 13.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.83 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 172 | VH 1163 Raku round tea bowl Unknown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 9.1 ! 11.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.18 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 173 | VH 1164 Tea bowl with mottled brown glaze Shidoro ware Shizuoka | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.8 ! 11.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.21 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 174 | VH 1193 Green jar with two small loop handles Possibly Takeo Karatsu ware Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware; wood | 19.7 ! 20.1 ! 18.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.37a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 175 | VH 1194 Red Raku tea bowl with treasure balls in gold Unknown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8 ! 12.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.15 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 176 | VH 1198 Bowl for sweets in E-Gōrai style Kyoto style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.7 ! 18.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.47 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 177 | VH 1214 Tea cup with porcelain appliqués Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8 ! 6.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.114 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 178 | VH 1219 Red Raku tea bowl with Mount Fuji in white slip Sumidagawa ware Tokyo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.5 ! 12.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.12 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 179 | VH 1224 Vase in the style of a bronze Sorori vase Marked “Gandosai” | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 24.7 ! 7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.57 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 180 | VH 1238 Hanging vase in the shape of a Buddhist gong Possibly Ōhi ware Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 24 ! 24.5 ! 9.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.101 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 181 | VH 1239 Large tea bowl with mottled dark-green glaze Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware | 6.3 ! 15.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.26 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 182 | VH 1245 Vase with a large disk mouth rim Seto ware Akazu, Aichi | Marked “Shunrin” | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 22 ! 27 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.98 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 183 | VH 1249 Blue serving bowl with mythical beasts in relief Kairakuen ware Wakayama | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 9.5 ! 12.1 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.34 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 184 | VH 1264 Small black Raku tea bowl with high footring Unknown Raku workshop | Edo period, early 19c. Earthenware | 10.7 ! 10 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.78 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 185 | VH 1270 Tea bowl with design of plum blossoms Kyoto ware, Kenzan style Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 11.38 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.40 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 186 | VH 1282 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854) Tea bowl in Sawankhalok style Kyoto | Edo period, second quarter of 19c. Stoneware | 7 ! 14 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.30 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 187 | VH 1284 Large sake bottle with ridges Shōdai ware Kumamoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 21.3 ! 16.35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.32 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 188 | VH 1290 Large sake bottle with burned surface Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 28.8 ! 19.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.62 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 189 | VH 1299 Small round jar with design of floral scrolls Sawankhalok ware Thailand | 16c. Stoneware; bamboo | 12.6 ! 11.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.42a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 190 | VH 1315 Cylindrical tea bowl with wheel ridges Kyoto ware Kyoto | False seal of “Ninsei” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 10.2 ! 10 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.25 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 191 | VH 1330 / VH 1095 Sake bottle of squeezed shape Shidoro ware Shizuoka | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 16.10 ! 12.25 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.105 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 192 | VH 1333 / VH 1224 White Raku tea bowl with brown glaze Unkown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 8.7 ! 11.98 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.67 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 193 | VH 1355 / VH 1620 Irregularly shaped tea bowl Karatsu style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.1 ! 14.58 ! 9.64 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.109 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 194 | VH 1356 Cylindrical tea bowl with white slip inlay Possibly Yatsushiro ware Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware | 8.6 ! 10.93 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.25 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 195 | VH 1401 / VH 1814 Water jar with copper-red stripes Takamatsu ware Kagawa | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware; metal | 20 ! 17.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.53a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 196 | VH 1402 / VH 1809 Square coal keeper with design of bamboo Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 18c. to early 19c. Earthenware | 18.1 ! 14 ! 13.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.99a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 197 | VH 1411 / VH 1372 Red bulbous vase with design of seven fishes Makuzu ware Kanagawa | Meiji period, end of 19c. Porcelain | 20.1 ! 13.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.4 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 198 | VH 1431 | VH 1843 Waste-water jar with flower and animal designs Banko ware Mie | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.1 ! 12.75 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.43 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 199 | VH 1436 Fan-shaped plate with inscribed poem Bōgasaki ware Nagasaki | Edo period, 1820s–1850s Stoneware | 2.9 ! 20.45 ! 11.55 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.14 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 200 | VH 1443 Serving bowl with rippled rim Satsuma ware Kagoshima | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware | 6 ! 13.34 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.27 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 201 | VH 1446 / VH 1716 Incense burner with “snake-skin” glaze Satsuma ware, black Satsuma type Kagoshima | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.4 ! 8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.111 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 202 | VH 1469 Square sake bottle with landscape design Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, second half of 18c. Stoneware | 22.6 ! 12.4 ! 12.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.85 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 203 | VH 1474 Bowl for sweets with design of dragon Sasashima ware Aichi | Edo period, mid 19c. Earthenware | 7.5 ! 16.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.11 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 204 | VH 1476 Cylindrical vase with incised floral pattern Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 18.35 ! 9.6 ! 4.79 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Ed.1944.3 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 205 | VH 1479 Tea bowl with design of pine, bamboo, and plum Kyoto ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Earthenware | 8 ! 12.48 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.19 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 206 | VH 1486 Inkstone in the shape of a koto (Japanese harp) Seto ware Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware; wood | 5.1 ! 20.75 ! 7.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.21a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 207 | VH 1489 Tea bowl with dripping brown glaze Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 7.2 ! 10.99 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.17 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 208 | VH 1498 / VH 1331 Tea bowl with design of camellia Kyoto ware Kyoto | Marked “Hōzan” and “Shōnen” Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.5 ! 11 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.63 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 209 | VH 1500 Hemispherical tea bowl with small footring False seal of “Raku” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 7.8 ! 12 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.8 | Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 210 | VH 1507 Sake cup with design of three flowers Banko ware Mie | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 4.2 ! 6.05 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10mm Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 211 | VH 1513 / VH 1061 Ōshima Kōkoku (1821–1904) Round incense container Unka ware Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 5.60 ! 8.1 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.100a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 212 | VH 1523 / VH 1275 Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743) Irregularly shaped incense or seal box with a scene from a classical tale Kyoto | Edo period, early 18c. Stoneware | 2.3 ! 10 ! 7.8 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 213 | VH 1532 Sake bottle with design of five carp Antō ware Mie | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 19.5 ! 13.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.57 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 214 | VH 1533 Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743) Square dish with design of camellia and inscribed Chinese poem Kyoto | Edo period, 1716–1731 Stoneware | 21.5 ! 21.5 cm Courtesy of Sally Hannon

Plate 215 | Possibly VH 1033 Figure of Otafuku (plump, cheery woman) Fushimi ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 14.7 ! 10.65 ! 5.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.55 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 216 | Possibly VH 819 Large sake bottle with dripping green-brown glaze Shigaraki ware Shiga | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 4.25 ! 23.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.51 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 217 | Possibly VH 894 Tea bowl with blue-green crackled glaze Kyoto ware Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 8.8 ! 11.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.18 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 218 Sake cup with floral design Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.2 ! 6.76 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10a Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 219 Blue-and-white sake cup with inscribed poem Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, early 19c. Porcelain | 3.8 ! 3.64 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10aa Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 220 Yamada Jōzan I (1868–1942) Red sake cup in cylindrical form Tokoname ware Aichi | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 5.25 ! 4.43 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 221 Miniature jar with an octopus in relief at the mouth Mashiko ware Tochigi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 4 ! 3.8 ! 3.18 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10bb Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 222 Sake cup with incised geometrical patterns Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 4.8 ! 5.91 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10c Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 223 Octagonal cup Dehua, Fujian, China | Qing dynasty, 19c. Porcelain | 4.25 ! 7.24 ! 6.1 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10cc Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 224 Red Raku sake cup with gold leaf Unknown Raku workshop | Edo period, 19c. Earthenware | 3.3 ! 7.53 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10d Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 225 Blue-and-white cup with flared rim China | Qing dynasty, end of 17c. to early 18c. Porcelain | 4.1 ! 7.49 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10dd Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 226 Sake cup with inscribed poem Edo period, 19c. Earthenware | 4.2 ! 5.92 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10e Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 227 | VH 1681 Blue-and-white sake cup in Vietnamese style Ippōdō ware Kyoto | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 4.1 ! 7.49 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10ee Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 228 Sake cup with a letter “fuku” (happiness) Seto ware, Ki-Seto type Aichi | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.4 ! 7.24 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10f Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 229 Sake cup with floral design Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 4.1 ! 6.34 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10ff Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 230 Sake cup with decoration in red and gold Kutani ware Ishikawa | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 3.7 ! 6.18 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10g Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 231 Miura Chikusen I (1853–1915) Blue-and-white sake cup with design of rabbits Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 2.95 ! 6.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10gg Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 232 Blue-and-white sake cup with design of a puppy and archaic letters Ippōdō ware Kyoto | Meiji period, 1886 Porcelain | 6.3 ! 6.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10h Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 233 Shallow sake cup with flared rim Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 2.5 ! 5.87 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10hh Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 234 Shallow sake cup with white slip Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 2.75 ! 7.08 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10i Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 235 Squarish cup with handle Edo period, 19c. Earthenware | 2.75 ! 5.6 ! 4.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10ii Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 236 Sake cup with design of bamboo Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 2.65 ! 6.12 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10j Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 237 Blue-and-white sake cup with phoenix design Probably Kyoto ware Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.45 ! 7.31 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10jj Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 238 Sake cup with sculpted rim Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.2 ! 6.88 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10k Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 239 Sake cup with brown glaze on exterior Kiyomizu ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.1 ! 6.95 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10kk Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 240 Sake cup in Mishima style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.55 ! 6.19 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10l Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 241 Double-gourd-shaped sake bottle Possibly Tokoname ware Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 21.95 ! 15.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.102 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 242 Miura Chikusen I (1853–1915) Blue-and-white sake cup with landscape design Kyoto | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 2.75 ! 7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10ll Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 243 Shallow sake cup in orange and grey Signed “Shigetsu” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 2.55 ! 6.49 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10m Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 244 Sake cup with design of fish Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.2 ! 6.89 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10n Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 245 Takahashi Dōhachi III (1811–1879) or IV (1845–1897) Blue-and-white sake cup with floral design Kyoto | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.2 ! 5.62 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10nn Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 246 Sake cup with design of a wave and bird Kyoto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3 ! 6.99 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10o Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 247 Sake cup with design of two flying birds Kyoto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 2.95 ! 7.13 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10oo Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 248 Four-lobed serving cup with handle Meiji period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.15 ! 8.53 ! 6.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10p Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 249 Blue-and-white sake cup with design of plants and landscape Kyoto style Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.5 ! 6.17 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10pp Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 250 Blue-and-white sake cup with design of alternating ribbons Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.2 ! 6.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10q Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 251 Miniature square bowl with polychrome design Chinese | Qing dynasty, 19c. Porcelain | 3.8 ! 5.32 ! 5.07 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10qq Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 252 Sake cup with design of fungus Kyoto ware Kyoto | Signed “Shōzan” | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.55 ! 6.34 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10r Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 253 Blue-and-white sake cup with floral design and letters Kyoto style Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 3 ! 6.98 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10rr Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 254 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854) Sake cup with design of sun, crane, and waves Kyoto | Edo period, 1830s–1854 Stoneware | 2.9 ! 4.5 ! 4.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10s Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 255 Sake cup with mottled grey glaze Karatsu style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.2 ! 6.29 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10ss Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 256 Sake cup with multicoloured hatched lines Kyoto style Edo period, 19c. Porcelain | 3.2 ! 5.65 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10t Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 257 Shallow sake cup with gilded interior Kikkō ware Osaka | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.2 ! 8.14 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10u Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 258 Sake cup with design of vine Kyoto ware Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.9 ! 6.18 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10v Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 259 Small cup with pale-blue crackled glaze Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 3.3 ! 7.06 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10w Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 260 Sake cup decorated in green and brown Banko ware Mie | Edo period, mid 19c. Stoneware | 2.4 ! 5.65 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10x Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 261 Sake cup decorated in polychrome enamels Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 3.5 ! 5.52 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.10y Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 262 Incense burner with sage-green crackled glaze Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 7.4 ! 9.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.20 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 263 Hexagonal incense container Zuishi ware Wakayama | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 6.2 ! 10.2 ! 8.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.22a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 264 Shallow bowl with white slip inlay Puncheong ware Korea | Choson dynasty, 16c. Stoneware | 6.75 ! 18.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.23 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 265 Miniature offering sake bottle Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.35 ! 3.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.62 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 266 Tea cup with design of chrysanthemum Akogi ware Mie | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.1 ! 8.31 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.65 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 267 Small blue-and-white chakin cloth case Possibly Kyoto ware Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Porcelain | 7.7 ! 3.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.75 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 268 Round tea caddy in Sawankhalok style Satsuma ware, Ryūmonji kiln Kagoshima | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.2 ! 9.36 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.90a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 269 Vase with design of irises Makuzu ware Kanagawa | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 36.3 ! 20.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.91 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 270 Double-gourd-shaped ewer with handle Arita ware, Kakiemon type Saga | Edo period, possibly end of 17c. Porcelain | 11.5 ! 13.8 ! 9.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.93a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 271 Bowl with inscribed poem and plum branches Kyoto ware, Kenzan style Kyoto | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.3 ! 9.97 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Dp.95 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 272 Blue-and-white plate in kraak style Arita ware Saga | Edo period, late 17c. Porcelain | 6.5 ! 37.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ed.11 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 273 Square ewer with design of pines and geometric pattern Arita ware Saga | Meiji period, late 19c. Porcelain | 14.4 ! 18.5 ! 8.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.19 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 274 Tea caddy with two tiny lugs Takatori style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.8 ! 6.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.23 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 275 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Seto ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.4 ! 6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.24 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 276 Tea caddy with mat brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.4 ! 6.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.25 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 277 Tall tea caddy with wheel ridges Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 10 ! 5.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.27 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 278 Tea caddy of maru-tsubo (round-jar) shape Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.6 ! 6.21 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.29a-b Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 279 Small, round tea caddy Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 4.95 ! 5.58 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.31 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 280 Bulbous tea caddy with mottled brown glaze Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.9 ! 5.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.32 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 281 Tea caddy with mat dark-brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.7 ! 6.32 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.33 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 282 Tea caddy with mottled brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.1 ! 5.75 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.34 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 283 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.8 ! 6.47 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.35 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 284 Tea caddy in cylindrical form Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.2 ! 5.64 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.36 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 285 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Takatori ware Fukuoka | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 5.8 ! 7.06 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.37 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 286 Tea caddy of shiri-bukura (swelling-at-bottom) shape Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 11.1 ! 11.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.38 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 287 Tea caddy of imo-no-ko (little-potato) shape Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 8 ! 6.05 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.39 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 288 Tea caddy of maru-tsubo (round-jar) shape Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.6 ! 8.15 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.40 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 289 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Possibly Satsuma ware Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.5 ! 5.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.43 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 290 Tea caddy with shiny glaze Possibly Ofuke ware Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.9 ! 5.62 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.44 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 291 Round tea caddy with small mouth Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.5 ! 6.39 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.46 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 292 Inoue Ryōsai I (1828–1899) Tea caddy with two tiny ring handles Sumida ware Tokyo | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.4 ! 5.41 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.47 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 293 Tea caddy in irregular shape with two lugs Takatori style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.5 ! 6.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.48 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 294 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 9 ! 6.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.49 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 295 Tea caddy with shiny glaze Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware | 6.45 ! 5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.51 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 296 Tea caddy of elongated shape Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 10.3 ! 6.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.52 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 297 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.2 ! 6.36 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.54 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 298 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 12.1 ! 7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.55 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 299 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 17c.–18c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.40 ! 6.6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.56 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 300 Tea caddy with light-brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.35 ! 6.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.57 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 301 Slender tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.20 ! 5.35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.58 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 302 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Possibly Takatori ware Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.9 ! 6.54 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.60 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 303 Tea caddy with two tiny lugs Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.60 ! 6.55 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.62 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 304 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.03 ! 6 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.63 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 305 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape with shiny glaze Takatori style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 9.1 ! 5.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.64 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 306 Tea caddy with mottled brown glaze Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.7 ! 5.9 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.65 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 307 Tea caddy with shiny glaze Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.5 ! 6.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.66 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 308 Tea caddy of taikai (vast-sea) shape Possibly Chinese, 14c.–15c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.1 ! 10.65 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.67 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 309 Tea caddy in karamono (Chinese) style Seto style Edo period, possibly 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.9 ! 7.98 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.68 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 310 Tall tea caddy with small mouth Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 11.7 ! 8.15 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.69 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 311 Tall tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto or Mino ware, Oribe style Aichi | Edo period, early 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 11.4 ! 6.4 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.72 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 312 VH 306 Tea caddy of taikai (vast-sea) shape Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 6.2 ! 12.8 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.73 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 313 Tea caddy with low neck and mottled dark-brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.5 ! 7.16 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.75 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 314 Tea caddy with dark-brown glaze Seto ware Aichi | Edo period, 17c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.3 ! 5.87 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.76 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 315 Tea caddy of imo-no-ko (little-potato) shape Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Muromachi–Momoyama period, 16c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.7 ! 6.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.78 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 316 Tea caddy of shiri-bukura (swelling-at-bottom) shape Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 5.7 ! 6.5 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.79 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 317 Tea caddy of katatsuki (square-shoulder) shape Seto style Edo period, 19c. Stoneware; ivory | 9 ! 6.15 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.80 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 318 Tea caddy of heishi (sake-jar) shape Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 7.75 ! 7.67 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.81 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 319 Tea caddy with wheel ridges Seto style Edo period, 18c.–19c. Stoneware; ivory | 8.9 ! 6.35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1944.Ee.82 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 320 Large tea jar with black-and-white stripes Shigaraki ware or Mashiko ware Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 47 ! 32 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1988(1944).Ee.6 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 321 Sake bottle with slim neck Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 19.8 ! 7.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1989(1944).Ee.8 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 322 Tea jar with four lugs Possibly Seto or Mino ware Aichi | Edo period Stoneware | 14.93 ! 6.50 ! 4.01 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Ed.1944.1 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 323 Black Raku hexagonal incense container with wooden lid Unknown Raku workshop | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware; wood Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Ed.1944.2 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

Plate 324 Cylindrical vase with wheel ridges Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 14.93 ! 6.50 ! 4.01 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Ed.1944.5 Adaline Van Horne Bequest

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Plate 325 Small deep dish with polychrome floral and geometric designs Arita ware, Imari style Saga | Edo period, early 19c. Porcelain | 4.2 ! 14.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.15 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 326 Tall white sake bottle with small neck Tamba ware Hyōgo | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 22 ! 8.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.19 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 327 Sake ewer with design of squash Kotō ware Shiga | Meiji period, late 19c. Stoneware | 21.3 ! 20.3 ! 11.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.21 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 328 Tea bowl in intentionally distorted shape Meiji period, late 19c. Earthenware | 7.2 ! 14.3 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.29 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 329 Tea bowl with mustard glaze over brown slip Takatori ware Fukuoka | Edo-Meiji period, mid to late 19c. Stoneware | 7.7 ! 11.7 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.52 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 330 White sake bottle with green glaze Shigaraki ware Shiga | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 15.5 ! 6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.60 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 331 Lantern in the shape of a pagoda Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 18 ! 17.2 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.64 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 332 Jar with small mouth, covered with wheel ridges Possibly Korean | Possibly Koryo dynasty, 13c.–14c. Stoneware | 27.5 ! 16.9 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.65 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 333 Ovoid sake bottle with celadon glaze Banko ware Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 16 ! 7.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.7 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 334 Tubular black Raku type tea bowl Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Earthenware | 12.7 ! 11.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.74 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 335 Rectangular sake bottle with green-and-yellow glaze Kyushu Island | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 20.8 ! 8.7 ! 8.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.77 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 336 Straight-sided sake bottle with short neck Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 18 ! 8.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.80 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 337 Serving bowl with thick ridges Seto ware Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 9.1 ! 15.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.87 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 338 Jar with celadon glaze and moulded decoration Kyoto ware Kyoto | Meiji period, end of 19c. Stoneware | 27.3 ! 24.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.89 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 339 Shallow bowl with mottled dark-green glaze Seto ware Aichi | Marked “Shuntai” | Edo period, early 19c. Stoneware | 5.8 ! 14.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.92 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 340 Small tea bowl with swelling belly Seto ware, Ki-Seto type Aichi | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 8.4 ! 10.8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.94 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 341 Large serving bowl with pale-green glaze Akahada ware Nara | Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.9 ! 17.5 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.103 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 342 Serving bowl with wide ridges Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 7.8 ! 13.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.106 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 343 Sake bottle with narrow neck Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 14.4 ! 8 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.114 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 344 Vase in Chimaki shape Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 11.5 ! 10.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.116 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Plate 346 Raku Ryōnyū (1756–1834) Red Raku tea bowl with design of Mount Fuji Kyoto | Edo period, late 18c. to early 19c. Earthenware | 8.3 ! 12.4 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.10 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

Plate 347 Figure of Daikoku (God of wealth) on a mallet Seto ware Aichi | 1864 Stoneware | 14 ! 16 ! 10 cm Royal Ontario Museum 944.16.35 Given in memory of my grandfather, the late Sir William Van Horne

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Plate 345 Sake bottle with gilded mouth rim Takatori style Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Stoneware | 19 ! 8.6 cm Royal Ontario Museum 909.22.124 Gift of Sir William Van Horne

Case Studies Akiko Takesue

Case Study 1

Van Horne bought this piece from a Japanese dealer named K. Kitajima (unidentified) on 31 January 1896 for $42. While it is attributed to a Kyoto potter, Takahashi Dōhachi, in Van Horne’s notebook, the potter’s mark on the bottom indicates it as a work by Inoue Ryōsai II. Ryōsai II was a son of a Seto potter, Kawamoto Jihei, and was later adopted by Ryōsai I of Imado kiln in Tokyo. He took on the name of Ryōsai in 1875. Ryōsai II made okimono and export wares that displayed his sculptural skills.

CS Top Figure 1 VH 490: Sake bottle with figures of three boys –sai II Imado ware, Inoue Ryo (1845–1905) Meiji period, late 19c. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

CS Bottom Figure 2 Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #490 “Dohachi bottle gourd shape/ K. Kitajima #994 Jan. 31 ’96”; “$42 Brown with three children.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest.

CS Opposite Figure 3 William Van Horne, Sake bottle with figures of three boys, 1896, watercolour on paper, 27 ! 19.5 cm. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

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Case Study 2

Van Horne purchased this piece from Matsuki Bunkio for $8. The exact year of the purchase was not recorded, an uncommon occurrence in the notebooks. The form of this white ewer is filled with parodies: the body is in the shape of a straw rice-bag (tawara), often associated with rats who eat rice, and the rat that forms the spout is being chased by the cat, which functions as the lid knob. While Van Horne attributed this piece as white Satsuma ware, its refined sense of humour indicates its Kyoto origin. CS Top Figure 4 VH 394: Sake ewer with ratshaped spout and cat-shaped lid knob Kyoto ware Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. CS Bottom Figure 6 Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #394 “Satsuma tea pot/ Matsuki”; “$8.00” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Opposite Figure 5 William Van Horne, White Satsuma-ware ewer with mouseshaped spout and cat-shaped lid knob, 1896, watercolour and opaque watercolour with iron gall ink over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 39.1 ! 28.4 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.4. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario

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Case Study 3

This pitcher was acquired in September 1893 from Matsuki Bunkio for $48, a relatively high price among Van Horne’s acquisitions during his early years of collecting. Its shape was not originally Japanese, which suggests that it was made in the Meiji period (1868–1912) when things European were considered exotic and popular among the Japanese. While the two seals on the base may suggest its Kyoto origin, its clay, shape, and glaze indicate its production outside of Kyoto.

CS Figure 7 Top VH# 307: Pitcher with brownand-green glaze Kyoto-related kiln Meiji period, late 19c Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. CS Figure 9 Bottom Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #307 “Brown Satsuma jug/ Maiko or OFUKE (Shugio)/ Matsuki Sept. ’93/ $48/ Mark “Kakitsubata Okunizan.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 8 Opposite William Van Horne, Pitcher with brown-and-green glaze, 1896, watercolour on paper, 27 ! 22 cm. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

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Case Study 4

Van Horne’s collection contained many sake bottles in a range of shapes, including square examples such as this one. Made in Kyoto, this bottle, decorated with a landscape, is similar in style to the examples illustrated in the collector’s notebook and watercolours shown here. Together they serve to illustrate Van Horne’s approach to the documentation of a variety of object types and designs.

CS Figure 10 Top VH# 325: Square sake bottle with landscape design Kiyomizu ware, Kyoto Edo period, late 17c to early 18c. MMFA 1944.Dp.85 Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 11 Bottom Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #325 “KIOTO (Shugio + Morse) square bottle/ Matsuki Sept. ’93”; “$20.00, yellowish white/ blue décor/ (M. invoice under head/ AWATA and KIOTO).” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 12 Opposite William Van Horne, Kyoto-ware square sake bottle with design of landscape in blue on white ground, 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 38.9 ! 28.3 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.2. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario

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Case Study 5

The two tea bowls depicted in this watercolour are both reserved at the Royal Ontario Museum – the only instance where two objects depicted in a watercolour survive in a museum. Van Horne probably drew them together because of their similarity in type and colour. While Van Horne suggested the possibility of both of them being Shidoro ware, their origins have not been identified to date.

CS Figure 13 Top VH# 485: Conical tea bowl with greenish-brown glaze Unknown kiln Edo-Meiji period, 19c. ROM 944.16.20 Photo Credit: Brian Boyle © Royal Ontario Museum. CS Figure 15 Bottom Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #485 “Shidoro Totomi/ tea bowl/ Matsuki 1894 #23”; “$16.00.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 14 Opposite William Van Horne, Two tea bowls: [left] with rough clay and brownish-grey glaze; [right] with fine clay and ochre glaze covering up half (see Case Study 6), 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 28.5 ! 39 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.42. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

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Case Study 6

CS Figure 16 Top VH# 416: Tea bowl half-covered with mustard-colour glaze Unknown kiln Edo-Meiji period, 19c. ROM 944.16.1 Photo Credit: Brian Boyle © Royal Ontario Museum. CS Figure 18 Bottom Van Horne notebook titled “D.B.”, #416 “Possibly Isumo [sic] (Shugio) bowl, Shidoro Totomi (Morse)/ Matsuki”; “$9.00”; “Shugio 1900 … [illeg.]” (in pencil). (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 17 Opposite William Van Horne, Two tea bowls: [left] with rough clay and brownish-grey glaze (see Case Study 5); [right] with fine clay and ochre glaze covering up half, 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 28.5 ! 39 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.42. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

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Case Study 7

In the early days of collecting, Van Horne was interested in refined pieces with colourfully painted decoration such as this. Akusawa Susumu (active late-nineteenth century) was the major source of these decorative ceramics. After 1892, Van Horne’s interest turned to simple, unassuming ceramics made for the Japanese market.

CS Figure 19 Top VH# 276: Incense burner in the shape of sitting cat Probably Hozan workshop, Awata ware, Kyoto Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. CS Figure 20 Bottom Van Horne notebook, titled “D.B.”, #276 “Kioto (S) and by HOZAN/ Satsuma censor – Cat – / Akusawa says Ninsei/ From S. Akusawa/ $24.60/ said to be from old priests (Kxxx (illeg.)) Collection, Nara, Japan.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 21 Opposite William Van Horne, Incense burner in the shape of sitting cat, 1896, watercolour on paper, 22.5 ! 18 cm. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

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Case Study 8

This large sake bottle contains two sho, or 3.6 litres. While it is made in the style of Chinese Cizhou ware of the sixteenth century, the ornamental decoration on the neck proves the Japanese production. The two letters are fuku (happiness) and ju or kotobuki (longevity or celebration). The painted designs of scattered treasures and a pair of phoenix represent auspiciousness.

CS Figure 22 Top VH# 470: Large sake bottle with letters of “fuku” and “ju” Kyoto ware, Kyoto Edo-Meiji period, 19c. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. CS Figure 23 Bottom Van Horne notebook, titled “D.B.”, #470. “Karatsu large bottle/ B. Matsuki 1894 #42/ $36.00.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 24 Opposite William Van Horne, Large sake bottle with letters of “fuku” and “ju,” 1896, watercolour on paper, 29.5 ! 22 cm. Courtesy of Sally Hannon. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

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Case Study 9

CS Figure 25 Top VH# 277: Round sake bottle with floral design Ko-Kiyomizu style, Kyoto ware Edo period, end of 17c. MMFA 1944.Dp.33 Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 26 Bottom Van Horne notebook, titled “D.B.”, #277 “Kioto (old) bottle/ About 1700–1750 Mark Mizoro [illeg.]/ From … Prof Morse”; “$25.00/ [illeg.]/ coloured glaze/ cracked.” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 27 Opposite William Van Horne, Kyoto-ware bottle in white with floral design, 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 38.4 ! 28.7 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2010. LA.VHF.S5.F1.63. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

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Case Study 10

The Japanese spiny lobster (Ise-ebi), without lobster claws, is considered auspicious, and is often served as part of the New Year celebration. This tea bowl symbolizes the festivity, and was used specifically for the first tea ceremony of the year.

CS Figure 28 Top VH# 336: Tea bowl with design of red spiny lobster Kyoto ware Meiji period, late 19c. MMFA 1944.Dp.56 Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 29 Bottom Van Horne notebook, titled “D.B.”, #336 “2nd Minpei bowl – lobster décor/ white body/ Matsuki Sept 93”; additional notes in pencil “Shugio thinks may be 1st Minpei – too good for 2nd”; “$30.00 mark ‘Minpei’” (MMFA 19.2017) Photo MMFA, Christine Guest. CS Figure 30 Opposite William Van Horne, Two Mimpeiware tea bowls: [left] with a scene from a narrative in polychrome on white; [right] with Japanese spiny red lobster, 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 28.2 ! 39.3 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.47. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario.

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Information on documents and notes can be found on page 196

Bibliographies

in t ro du c t ion , ron g r a h am Berton, Pierre. Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada’s Greatest Businessmen. Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1959. – The Great Railway. Vol. 2, The Last Spike, 1881–1885. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971. Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013. Germain, Annick, and Damaris Rose. Montréal: Quest for a Metropolis. Chichester and London: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Lavallée, Omer. Van Horne’s Road: The Building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Markham, on: Fifth House, 2007. Knowles, Valerie. From Telegrapher to Titan: The Life of William C. Van Horne. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2004. Macnaughtan, Sarah. My Canadian Memories. London: Chapman & Hall, 1920. Smith, Donald B. “Chiefs Journey,” www.canadashistory.ca/Explore/FirstNations,-Inuit-Metis/Chiefs-Journey. Sullivan, David. Minister’s Island: Sir William Van Horne’s Summer Home in St Andrews. St Andrews, nb: Pendlebury Press, 2007. th e nat ion bu il der, peter c . n ew m a n Further Reading Bellevue, Doug. Montreal’s Golden Square Mile: A Neighborhood. 2017. Privately published, 2017.

Berton, Pierre. The Great Railway. Vol. 1: The National Dream, 1871–1881, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970. – The Great Railway. Vol. 2: The Last Spike, 1881–1885. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1971. Brooke, Janet M. Discerning Tastes: Montreal Collectors, 1880–1920. Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1989. Collard, Edgar Andrew. All Our Yesterdays. Montreal: The Gazette, 1988. – Montreal Yesterdays. Toronto: Longmans Canada, 1962. Eggermont-Molenaar, Mary. The Van Horne Collection: A Dutch Treat. Memo Books, 2015. Germain, Annick, and Damaris Rose. Montréal: The Quest for a Metropolis. Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Knowles, Valerie. From Telegrapher to Titan: The Life of William C. Van Horne. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2004. Lavallée, Omer. Van Horne’s Road: The Building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Markham, on: Fifth House, 2007. MacKay, Donald. The Square Mile: Merchant Princes of Montreal. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987. Macnaughtan, Sarah. My Canadian Memories. London: Chapman and Hall, 1920. Nichol, Barbara. Trunks All Aboard: An Elephant ABC. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2001. Regehr, Theodore D. “Sir William Cornelius Van Horne.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 14: 1991 to 1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Sandburg, Carl. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953. Sullivan, David. Minister’s Island: Sir William Van Horne’s Summer Home in St Andrews. St Andrews, nb: Pendlebury Press, 2007. Vaughan, Walter. The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne. New York: The Century Co., 1920. Margaret W. Westley. Remembrance of Grandeur: The Anglo-Protestant Elite of Montreal, 1900–1950. Montreal: Éditions Libre Expression, 1990.

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Contributors

janet m. brooke is an independent scholar based in Montreal, following several decades as a curator and director at three Canadian museums. She specializes in collecting history and is currently reconstructing the European paintings collection of Sir William Van Horne. ron graham is a Toronto-based author, journalist, and freelance curator. He is currently researching a book on nineteenth-century Burmese photographs. peter c. newman is a celebrated Canadian journalist, author, and editor. In 1998, he received the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Toronto Star’s Excellence in Journalism Award. akiko takesue is exhibition research assistant at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, working on a Japanese art exhibition to open in 2019. She completed a PhD dissertation on the Van Horne collection of Japanese ceramics in 2016. laura vigo, PhD (soas University of London), is curator for the arts of Asia at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She is currently overseeing the forthcoming reinstallation for the entire Asian arts permanent collection. Her research interests span from museum historiography to postcolonial theory applied to the material agency of objects with a particular emphasis on the exotic.

Acknowledgments

The Gardiner Museum wishes to thank its publication sponsor, Power Corporation of Canada, and exhibition sponsor, Canadian Pacific. We are grateful to our institutional partner, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, our institutional collaborators, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, and all the lenders who have made this exhibition possible: the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture of New Brunswick, Library and Archives Canada, Sally Hannon, and James E. Lanigan. We would also like to acknowledge the generous support provided by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Museum Assistance Program.

exhibition curators Ron Graham, Guest Curator Akiko Takesue, Guest Curator, Assistant th e g ard i ner mu s eu m Kelvin Browne, Executive Director and ceo Lauren Gould, Chief Operating Officer Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator Karine Tsoumis, Curator Micah Donovan, Curatorial Installation Manager Christine May, Major Exhibitions Manager Christina MacDonald, Collections Manager Natalie Hume, Interim Major Exhibitions Manager Siobhan Boyd, Senior Manager, Education & Programs/Adjunct Curator Rea McNamara, Programs Manager Rachel Weiner, Senior Manager, Marketing Tara Fillion, Art Director m ont rea l mu s eum of fi ne a rts ex h i bi t ion cu r ator Laura Vigo, Curator of Asian Art th e mont rea l mu s eum of f ine a rts Nathalie Bondil, Director General and Chief Curator Jacques Parisien, President Danielle Champagne, Director, Foundation Mathieu Laperle, Director, Administration Pascale Chassé, Director, Communications Thomas Bastien, Director, Education and Wellness Danièle Archambault, Registrar and Head of Archives Claudine Nicol, Photographic Services Technician Anne-Marie Chevrier, Loan and Acquisition Technician Natalie Vanier, Cataloguer Danielle Blanchette, Documentation Technician Christine Guest, Photographer Denis Farley, Photographer Richard Gagnier, Head, Conservation Nathalie Richard, Decorative Arts Conservator Isabelle Corriveau, Interim Head of Exhibition Administration Francine Lavoie, Head of Publishing Sébastian Hart, Publishing Assistant Justine Desrosiers, Assistant, Curatorial Sandra Gagné, Head, Exhibitions Production

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Additional Illustration Credits

Page 78 Background William Van Horne, Note by Van Horne listing items from Mr. Shugio, 3 January 1897. Graphite pencil with brown ink on graph paper, 20.4 ! 13.1 cm. Top right William Van Horne, Note titled “1046,” with notes and sketches on pieces, late-19th to early-20th century. Pen and black ink with graphite pencil on paper, 17.9 ! 11.5 cm. Bottom right William Van Horne, Note titled “the Kikko-Chiku” on the letterhead of Japanese Consulate General, ca 1896. Pen and iron gall ink on paper, 26.6 ! 21.1 cm. Page 79 Bottom right William Van Horne, Handwritten note titled “Matazayemon Kitanokoji,” with Japanese characters and sketch of a vase, 1884–1914, 18 ! 11.5 cm. Background William Van Horne, Small note with ink drawing of two bowls and small tea caddy. Pencil sketch of fish, on verso, 1884–1914, 11.8 ! 20.5 cm. Top right William Van Horne, Sketches of Japanese pottery on letterhead of His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Consulate for Canada. Sketches on both sides, 1905–1910. Pencil, 21.5 ! 27.2 cm. Page 182 Top right Russell L. Bond, Auction Catalogue for the collection of the late William C. Van Horne at Covenhoven, 11–12 March 1977. Printed pamphlet, 21.6 ! 15.5 ! 0.3 cm. Bottom right Ad regarding auction sales, clipped from the Gazette, 18 September 1969, 22.7 ! 14.8 cm. Background Dusty Vineberg, “A great collection dwindles,” Montreal Star, 2 December 1972, 61 ! 37 cm.

Page 183 Top left and right Sir William’s Legacy, Time magazine, 6 November 1972, 27.6 ! 37 cm. Bottom left Dusty Vineberg, “Van Horne ‘treasures’ denied,” Montreal Star, 2 August 1972, 17.8 ! 18.6 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S2.F39.2, LA.VHF.S2.F39.3, LA.VHF.S2.F39.4, LA.VHF.S2.F107.2, LA.VHF.S2.F107.3, LA.VHF.S2.F127.1, LA.VHF.S13.F33.1, LA.VHF.S13.F107.1, LA.VHF.S13.F107.2, LA.VHF.S13.F107.3, LA.VHF.S15.F56.1 Images © Art Gallery of Ontario. Title page William Van Horne, Two tea bowls: (left) Shino ware with design of silver grass; (right) with thick green glaze on mouth, 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 28.4 ! 38.9 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs. William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.60. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario Page 107 William Van Horne, Tall sake bottle in grey with design of plum branches in white and small Hotei figure in relief (detail), 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 38.9 ! 28.4 cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.28. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario Page 161 William Van Horne, Large sake bottle with black and brown decoration, in grey with design of plum branches in white and small Hotei figure in relief (detail), 1896, watercolour over traces of graphite pencil on paper, 39 ! 28.1cm. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Estate of Matthew S. Hannon, in memory of Mrs William Van Horne, 2001. LA.VHF.S5.F1.27. Image © Art Gallery of Ontario