June and Simon Li Lecture in the History of Art
On Painting Everything:
Japanese Art in the Early Modern Information Age
Professor Chelsea Foxwell (University of Chicago)
In 2020, the British Museum acquired 103 line drawings by Hokusai in a box labeled The Great Picture Book of Everything (Banmotsu ehon daizenzu 万物絵本大全図, dated 1829). The drawings, which appear ready for carving into a multi-volume woodblock-printed book, are closely related to 178 drawings of equally varied subject matter in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This presentation explores the cultural and intellectual position behind the will to draw “everything” not only in the work of Hokusai but also in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan more broadly. This impulse reflects urbanization and the rise of the early modern information age worldwide. It also bears characteristics specific to Edo or Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), where the government attempted to limit and control the flow of information. We will explore what happened when the desire to draw everything abutted against transmitted norms about the social functions of pictures.
