Sir William Van Horne (1843–1915), a gifted connoisseur most famously associated with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, amassed of one of the most extensive collections of Japanese ceramics in North America. Obsession is an illuminating account of the how and why behind his passion for studying and acquiring nearly 1,200 objects. Ron Graham assembles a profile of Van Horne's larger-than-life personality as well as essays about his place at the top of the art collectors in Montreal's Golden Square Mile and the afterlife of his collection following his death. Accompanying the texts are historical photographs and documents, a detailed catalogue of over three hundred individual pieces in the Royal Ontario Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and a selection of beautiful reproductions of Van Horne's personal notebooks and exquisite watercolours from the archives of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Obsession presents a remarkable collection in the context of the life and career of a nineteenth-century Canadian business giant.

This volume explores the changing process of evaluating objects during the period of Japan’s rapid modernization. Originally published in Japanese, Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan looks at the approach toward object-based research across the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, which were typically kept separate, and elucidates the intellectual continuities between these eras. Focusing on the top-down effects of the professionalizing of academia in the political landscape of Meiji Japan, which had advanced by attacking earlier modes of scholarship by antiquarians, Suzuki shows how those outside the government responded, retracted, or challenged new public rules and values. He explores the changing process of evaluating objects from the past in tandem with the attitudes and practices of antiquarians during the period of Japan’s rapid modernization. He shows their roots in the intellectual sphere of the late Tokugawa period while also detailing how they adapted to the new era. Suzuki also demonstrates that Japan’s antiquarians had much in common with those from Europe and the United States. Art historian Maki Fukuoka provides an introduction to the English translation that highlights the significance of Suzuki’s methodological and intellectual analyses and shows how his ideas will appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Potters and Patrons in Edo Period Japan: Takatori Ware and the Kuroda Domain traces the development of one of Japan's best-documented ceramic types, from its beginnings around 1600 until the abolition of the domain system in 1871. Using historical records, archaeological material from early kilns and consumer sites, and the results of comparative chemical analysis, this study explores the operation of Takatori as the official ceramic workshop of the Kuroda, lords of one of the largest domains in Japan. Spanning cultural, aesthetic, economic and practical aspects, this book presents Takatori ware as an ideal archetype with which to compare developments in elite ceramics in other parts of Japan throughout the Edo period. In addition to its scholarly examination of the operation of a domain-sponsored ceramics workshop over more than 250 years, the book includes illustrations of examples from each of the seven Takatori workshop locations, including beautiful pieces that have never before appeared in print.