Ernest Fenollosa
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (* February 18, 1853; † September 21, 1908 ) was an American professor of philosophy and economics.
Life
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa earned a degree in 1874 at Harvard. 1878 gave the acting already in Japan zoologist Edward S. Morse Fenollosa a position as lecturer in philosophy and economics in Tokyo. He taught at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and at the Imperial Normal School and was a manager of the pictorial art department of the Imperial Museum in Tokyo.
He was an important teacher during the modernization in the Meiji period and passionate orientalist, who campaigned together with Okakura Tenshin for the preservation of traditional Japanese art ( Nihonga ).
He soon began to care for Japanese art, traveling around the country, looked at the art treasures in the temples and regretted that Japan rushed to the modern Western art and its own traditional neglected. In his travels, he took the young Okakura Tenshin with an interpreter. With him, who found a job in the Ministry of Culture in 1880, he created the first list of Japan's national treasures and found ancient Chinese scrolls, which for centuries had been previously brought to Japan by Zen monks. Subsequently, the Japanese appointed him to their imperial art Officer - so he became the first foreign specialist for Japanese and Chinese art, which came to international fame.
Starting with the large folding screen pair of Matsushima Ogata Kōrin Fenollosa acquired a large number of works of art that can be seen today as Fenollosa -Weld Collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1884 he was of Kanō Hōgai "adopted" and included as Kanō Eitan (Japanese狩 野 永 探) in this famous family of artists. In 1886 he sold his collection to the physician Dr. Charles Weld and went back to Boston in 1890, where he was curator of the Oriental Collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. When he divorced his wife and married an assistant, he did not forgive the the Boston society: he had to give up his job in 1896 at the Museum. Fenollosa went back to Japan, found there now but no more suitable position and returned back to the U.S. in 1900. During a stay in London, he suffered a stroke and died there. His ashes were transferred to Japan and interred on the grounds of a temple side of the Mii -dera (also Onjo -ji), the Hōmyō - in, high above Lake Biwa. Fenollosa's widow was the young Ezra Pound for the publication of his estate, including about the Noh theater, win.
Works
- Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 1912. Reprint of ICG Muse, 2000. ISBN 4-925080-29-6