Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Siren’s Journey into Chinese Art

4. The Golden Pavilion

Sirén vividly described his sojourn in Japan during his first visit to East Asia in Den Gyllene Paviljongen: Minnen och Studier från Japan (The Golden Pavilion: Souvenirs and Studies from Japan, 1919). The book has a timeless quality, maybe because it is a mixture of tourist guide and art history—a familiar combination also found in contemporary tourist literature. It is entitled after the famous Kyoto temple of Kinkakuji 金閣寺, better known in English as The Golden Pavilion (Figure 8). His focus is on Japanese art and manners: the sections dealing with sculpture and architecture are more scholarly in character, whereas he is more informal in those passages which deal with visits to museums or local collectors’ homes. The atmospheric descriptions, such as the scenes in Kyoto, are the most informal parts of the text. Sirén arrived in Tokyo in early January 1918 while World War I was still raging (it ended in November that year). Japan was formally engaged on the Allied side but had been mostly left on its own in Asia, so it had extended its presence on the continent. Sirén spent one month in Tokyo. The letters of reference which Freer had given him were addressed to Nomura Yôzô 野村洋三 (1870–1965), Hara Tomitarô 原富太郎 (1868–1939), and Masuda Takashi 益田孝 (1848–1938), and they helped him gain entrance to the homes of Japanese collectors.1 The tradition of collecting Chinese art in Japan is a long one, centuries old, and during the early decades of the twentieth century the Japanese acted as guides to Western collectors and scholars, partly because Japan was more accessible than China. Japanese connoisseurs had one great advantage over the Western visitor: they used the same kind of brushes and ink as the Chinese. Therefore they knew the technique from the inside and, additionally, the educated Japanese were familiar with Chinese poetry and calligraphic styles. Western viewers had dismissed East Asian ink painting as sketching, a form of art lower than oil painting. This does not mean that the Japanese perception of Chinese painting corresponded in every 4 The Golden Pavilion 38 Enchanted by Lohans respect with the Chinese view. The difference is explained if we consider what kind of paintings the Japanese acquired from China. Japanese Buddhist monks who studied in China during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries played a key role in this story, bringing back from their voyages important religious paintings.2 The series of Lohan paintings in the Daitokuji (discussed in the previous chapter) was among the most treasured, but other genres and styles were also favored: a spontaneous and unassuming style using only black ink was particularly appreciated in tea-aesthetics. The Ashikaga shoguns of the Muromachi era (1392–1573) collected mainly Chinese paintings of the Southern Song dynasty, such as works by Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active before 1189 until after 1225) and Xia Gui 夏珪 (active ca. 1200–ca. 1240). As these were still appreciated by Japanese collectors and connoisseurs in the early twentieth century, they had remained in touch with the sensibility of Southern Song misty views dominated by ink wash and moist brushwork. It was mostly these types of painting that Sirén saw in private collections, and they made a deep impact on him, remaining his personal favorites throughout the rest of his career. Figure 8 Kinkakuji or The Golden Pavilion, photograph by Sirén, from Sirén, Den Gyllene Paviljongen, frontispiece The Golden Pavilion 39 In the vicinity of Tokyo, Sirén visited the homes of Masuda and Hara. He wrote excitedly to Freer about the three days he spent at Hara’s, attaching a photograph he had taken there with the letter (Figure 9). In the photograph the young Hara Zen’ichirô 原善一郎 and a friend of his are sitting on the tatami mats in the room where they have been looking at paintings together.3 Hara Tomitarô was a banker, a silk merchant, and an art collector; he painted himself as well. His house Sannotani 三の渓 was located close to Tokyo overlooking Yokohama Bay.4 According to Freer’s description, Hara’s Sannotani included temples, shrines, and tea rooms in addition to the house where Freer stayed for two weeks in 1907. The guest rooms were close to the warehouse built for the art collection.5 At the time of Freer’s visit, Hara had also recently begun collecting historical buildings, that is, transporting them from their original sites to...