Mediating the Foreign: Visual Trilingualism and the Reception of a Dutch Still Life in Eighteenth-Century Edo

In 1726, Dutch painter Willem van Royen’s painting: Birds and Flowers arrived in Japan as a gift from the Dutch East India Company to the Shogun Yoshimune. Subsequently, the painting was gifted to Gohyaku Rakanji, a Zen Obaku temple in Edo, where Japanese rangaku scholars: brothers Ishikawa Tairo and Moko and Tani Buncho encountered and copied the work. This article examines the translation in cultural meaning Van Royen’s painting underwent by analyzing transcultural remediations, or indigenous re-interpretations spawned by encounters with the work, and the persistence of the image due to its... Mehr ...