To view a listing of objects without the introductory text, click here.
T. Tokuno, “Japanese wood-cutting and wood-cut printing,” S.R. Koehler, ed., in Smithsonian Institution. United States National Museum. Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1892. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), pp. 221-244. Smithsonian annual reports are available at many large libraries, and they can be accessed online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library project. The Tokuno report as edited by Koehler also was published as a separate pamphlet in 1894, and that edition is available online at Google Books, although the copy as digitized is missing some of the illustrations.
Almost a century later, former Smithsonian Graphic Arts curator Peter Morse published an updated version of the Tokuno text, "Tokuno's Description of Japanese Printmaking," with additional notes and annotations, in Essays on Japanese art presented to Jack Hillier, Matthi Forrer ed. (London : R.G. Sawers Pub., 1982).
The full text of the edited report is also available online, part of a very comprehensive website developed by David Bull who has added notes informed by his extensive knowledge of the process.
Ann Yonemura, curator at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Museums of Asian art, prepared an exhibition that included some of the NMAH Tokuno objects. The accompanying catalogue, Yokohama: Prints from nineteenth-century Japan, was published by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1990.
The Smart Museum exhibition catalogue discusses a range of developments in color printing in France and Japan from the 18th through the early 20th centuries in the context of their interactions and further developments in China and Europe. Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints, by Chelsea Foxwell and Anne Leonard, with contributions by David Acton, Laura Kalba, Andreas Marks, Andrew Stevens, Stephanie Su, and David Waterhouse. (Chicago: Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, 2012).
Another portion of the gift included several bound collections of prints, which now are housed in the Library of the Freer-Sackler Gallery. Some of them have been digitized, including ten volumes in Itsukushima zue, four volumes in Kōkōkan gashō and the two-volume Shūbi gakan. We are most grateful to Alessandro Bianchi, The Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the Freer Sackler Gallery, for his assistance in identifying and locating these volumes.
