Attributed to Kawahara Keiga (1786 - ca. 1860) and his studio

Description:

Japan / Netherlands, ca.1850
20 x 17 x 4,4 cm
Book bound in black cloth with dark green leather corners and spine, details in gilt. Contains 248 watercolours on paper with finely executed studies of fruits, flowers, insects, amphibians, fish, and other marine animals, each with titles and inscriptions in calligraphic script.
From a German pivate collection
Kawahara Keiga (1786-ca. 1860), also known by his family name Toyosuke, was a painter from Nagasaki active during the late Edo period and ranks among the most significant Japanese artists associated with Philipp Franz von Siebold. Keiga studied under Ishizaki Yūshi (1768-1846), Inspector of Chinese Painting in Nagasaki, who had access to Chinese and Dutch works and introduced Western pictorial techniques to his pupils. In 1823, the year of Siebold’s arrival in Japan, Keiga was appointed dejima de-iri eshi (“painter with access to Deshima”). Under Siebold’s commission, he produced highly detailed natural history paintings of Japan’s flora and fauna, which served as the visual basis for Siebold’s scientific publications, including Fauna Japonica and Flora Japonica. His oeuvre encompasses depictions of fish, crustaceans, reptiles and plants, executed with remarkable precision and informed by Western modes of observation. To support his research, Siebold arranged in 1825 for Carl Hubert de Villeneuve and Heinrich Bürger to come from Batavia to Nagasaki. Keiga worked closely with both: Villeneuve instructed him in European painting techniques, while Bürger oversaw zoological and botanical studies. After Siebold’s expulsion from Japan in 1829, Bürger continued the collaboration, commissioning further zoological and botanical drawings for Siebold. In a letter dated 1831, Bürger reported that Keiga had drawn 400 species of fish from life, of which 200, accompanied by detailed descriptions, were sent to Siebold. These drawings, together with numerous depictions of plants, crustaceans and reptiles, are now preserved in the Siebold Collection of the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), Leiden. The sheets are mostly unsigned, yet can be securely attributed to Keiga through Bürger’s correspondence. Keiga maintained a studio in Nagasaki, where assistants produced copies and variants of his compositions for Dutch clients on Deshima. These workshop pieces likewise remained unsigned, complicating attribution in individual cases. In a letter written in 1830, Siebold praised the high quality of Keiga’s plant and fish paintings, recommending that he be employed primarily in these fields, while Villeneuve executed the depictions of mammals and anatomical studies. Keiga’s works for Siebold represent a key intersection between Japanese pictorial tradition and Western scientific illustration, forming a central corpus in the visual documentation of Japan’s natural history in the early nineteenth century - Binding with some signs of age and slightly damaged ,the watercolours with minor spotting and slight foxing, otherwise very well preserved with strong colours.