This talk asks us to reconsider the origins of art history in Japan. It does so by setting up a comparison between the collecting activities of those engaged in what we now call the natural sciences and those engaged in what we now call the history of art. Agents in both fields were invested in finding exemplars, carefully labeling them, and arranging them according to morphological taxonomies. In chronological terms, the talk spans the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. In archival terms, the primary focus is tekagami, a genre of albums that compiled the so-called “exemplary hands” of calligraphers or painters. In reading art history and the natural sciences alongside one another, we arrive at a far more nuanced understanding of how the history of form emerged in early modernity.

Kristopher Kersy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at UCLA. His latest book is Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (Penn State University Press, 2024).