A Curator's View (2004)
Peter Harrington, Curator, Anne S. K. Brown Collection, Brown University Library
One of the treasures of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection is the Japanese scroll containing the 12 watercolor panels depicting the events of Admiral Perry's expedition to Japan. This rare item was acquired in October 1965 from Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. In the previous year, the scroll had been featured in a special Olympic Exhibition held in Yokohama, Japan. According to a note that accompanied the item, the creator of the images was described as "a consummate early painter who had not only seen the sights depicted, but also had the artistic ability to translate them into effective paintings of remarkable interest." While the name of this artist is not known, the work "clearly follows the artistic tradition of Shiba Kokan (1747–1818), the pioneer of Western-style art in Japan, and are doubtless the work of one of his disciples."
The scroll is housed in a kiri box and contains calligraphic inscriptions at the beginning and end of which were added later. These were penned in 1906 by a Chinese scholar named Wang Zhiben (1835?–1907), a specialist in painting and poetry. He had been invited to visit Japan on several occasions to teach, translate and especially write comments on art works. He died during his last visit at Nagasaki in 1907. The title of the present work, "The Pictorial Scroll of the American Warships Coming Eastward," was actually coined by him, while his hand-written inscription is quite revealing of early 20th century Asiatic attitudes towards western colonialism. It is worth quoting in full:
This pictorial scroll depicts the event when American warships came eastward. According to history, in June, the summer of the sixth year in the Kaei Reign (1853), the government of the United States of North America deployed four large warships and soldiers led by Navy commander Perry to Uraga in order to request a peace treaty and exchange trade, which was later rejected. Because Americans did not follow Japanese order, the Shogunate had no choice but to establish a temporary office in Kulihama, Uraga. When the American ambassadors landed, they marched swaggeringly, which made all the pedestrians feel offended. On the same day, the American ambassadors acted somehow arrogantly. Sometimes they fired empty artillery shells; sometimes they robbed civilian houses and intruded into the Japanese inner sea to measure and draw marine charts. This pictorial scroll recorded what really happened at that time. When I saw and displayed this scroll, the event popped out vividly. Until recently, we have got used to and not felt uneasy about ships from many foreign countries coming to request peace treaties. If this scroll did not exist, our descendents would not be able to know about the unscrupulousness of foreign arrivals like this, which is exactly what the scroll depicts.
Wang Zhiben recalled memories of similar visits by westerners to China but regretted that there were no pictures recording these events. "When I saw this scroll, I could not stop lamenting. Having written the title for the scroll, I then dropped down a few lines of my thoughts following the pictures in order to show my commemoration."
Mrs. Brown was drawn to the scroll by its fine details of costume and uniforms which was the original focus of her collection. In addition, the fact that Perry was a Rhode Islander also appealed to one who made her home in Newport, Perry's place of birth in 1794. The scroll complements other material in the collection depicting the Japan expedition. This includes the large lithographs by Heine along with one of his original watercolors, various Japanese broadsides, and several contemporary publications.