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'At Nagasaki' [Japan]

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Date

March 1869

Description

From an album by James Henry Butt (1844-1936) containing 51 watercolour drawings, 50 mounted on separate pages, with one loose item and three blank sheets. They are mainly in chronological order and were presumably mounted in the album and captioned later, generally in pencil on the album page below the image, though some have monograph signatures, brief inscriptions and dates. The opening view of Cape Town is followed by 45 Eastern ones, mostly coastal, with two figure studies of Japanese girls. The last two drawings are an undated view of Posillipo, near Naples and one of Start Point, Devon, the latter made in August 1870 before Butt's next (home) posting in May 1871. He made all the others while second and subsequently third lieutenant of HMS 'Sylvia', survey ship, Commander Edward Wolfe Brooker (1827-70), which sailed for the China Station in late 1866 via Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and the Andaman Islands to undertake hydrographic work mainly in southern and western Japan. No. 37 of 51. inscribed by the artist on the album page, as title and dated '3/69'. The view is across one of the steeply walled local watercourses, with the arch of a stone bridge on the right. On the other side two Japanese figures walk along the roadway outside a Buddhist shrine of which the stone wall has partly collapsed, revealing a belfry with a suspended large bronze bell inside the compound. This stands under the shade of a sinuous large tree.

Image Licence

CC BY-NC-ND

Image Credit

Location

Nagasaki, Japan

Country

Japan

Medium

Watercolour