Charles Holme’s detailed record of his travels through Japan, including the homeward journey via the west coast of the US and Canada, is published here for the first time, together with all fifty plates from the original limited edition of his companion Emma Liberty’s Japan, A Pictorial Record, with commentaries. Both diary and photographs provide scholars and researchers with a rare archive. A key figure in Europe’s art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founder of The Studio art magazine, Charles Holme was a significant disseminator of Japanese art and art goods in theWest and was a founding member of the Japan Society in London. Famously, he visited Japan in 1889 in the company of the painter Alfred East and Arthur Lasenby Liberty and his wife Emma, who was the ‘official’ photographer of the trip (taking more than a thousand photographs).

Annotation Charles Holme & rsquo;s detailed record of his travels through Japan, including the homeward journey via the west coast of the US and Canada, is published here for the first time, together with all fifty plates from the original limited edition of his companion Emma Liberty & rsquo;s Japan, A Pictorial Record, with commentaries. Both diary and photographs provide scholars and researchers with a rare archive. A key figure in Europe & rsquo;s art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founder of The Studio art magazine, Charles Holme was a significant disseminator of Japanese art and art goods in theWest and was a founding member of the Japan Society in London. Famously, he visited Japan in 1889 in the company of the painter Alfred East and Arthur Lasenby Liberty and his wife Emma, who was the & lsquo;official & rsquo; photographer of the trip (taking more than a thousand photographs).

Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme. This book examines the nineteenth century art world against this background and explores Japanese influences on four artists working in Britain in particular: the American James McNeill Whistler, the Australian Mortimer Menpes, and the 'Glasgow boys' George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Japonisme in Britian is richly illustrated throughout.