British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/british-museum-makes-103-lost-hokusai-drawings-available-online-180975869/

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

72 31 6 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

pseudolus• 6 years ago

Link (collection search) to the drawings:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?keyword=Banb...

contingencies• 6 years ago

For those who can't read Chinese ('Kanji'), some of the portraits cover Vietnam, Yunnan, China, India, Korea, Thailand, Mongolia and the Philippines as well as Japan. Possibly also some other areas in northeast Asia, I am unclear on the period terminology. As they are dated 1820s but seem to use Chinese terms from earlier periods, I guess this was an adaptation of an earlier set of Chinese descriptive texts or (heresy to suggest!) images that had been carried to Japan. But that's just supposition.

andi9993• 6 years ago

There is a huge overlap with Kanji, but I think chinese (characters) should be refered as 'Hanzi'or not? The page doesnt load too well on my mobile so not 100% sure what is on the page. Or you meant japanese kanji (adopted chinese characters)?

lioeters• 6 years ago

Thank you for the link to the drawings themselves. The curator's comments are fascinating. The opening paragraph, for a taste:

This group of 103 drawings represents a major new discovery relating to Hokusai’s life and works. An amazing range of subjects is represented – figure (religious, mythological, historical, literary), animal, bird and flower and other natural phenomena, and landscape.
As the subtitle ‘India, China’ signals, the group is dominated by subjects that relate to China, Southeast Asia, India and lands further west.
Some of the same subjects can be found within Hokusai’s known oeuvre, but many are completely new discoveries.
Among the latter is a fascinating group of images which imagine the origins of human culture in ancient China – early forms of habitation, fire, agriculture, making rice wine and paper, among other scenes.
All are treated with the customary fantasy, invention and brush skill found in Hokusai’s late works that could not be matched by any of his pupils – with the possible exception of his artist-daughter Eijo (art-name Ōi, about 1800-after 1857).

Rapzid• 6 years ago

Would love to get my hands on traditional woodblock prints of the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji...

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

There's a gallery in New York that specialises in ukiyo-e. The most notable original Hokusai prints are not cheap, but some of the work is surprisingly affordable. (And some isn't.)

There's also vintage woodblock porn, for those who like that kind of thing.

abetusk4• 6 years ago

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example).

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

Angostura2• 6 years ago

Not really, the copyright on the photograph will always belong to the photographer. The image is available under creative commons for non-commercial use, which seems fair enough.

foobar__• 6 years ago

Sadly, the images for non-commercial use appear to be restricted to a medium resolution with high JPEG compression artifacts [1].

As an example I downloaded the image https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613717051 (~1 MB, 2500x1973).

Still good enough for many use cases, but it limits personal prints.

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...

robin_reala• 6 years ago

Not necessarily. There has to be a “a significant expenditure of labour”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_Kingd...

abetusk4• 6 years ago

To be clear, you're saying that a public institution [1] who's charter is to provide access to artifacts that would otherwise normally be in the public domain and who's funding comes from donations and tax dollars should be expected to then copyright it's material when providing it digitally to the public?

Further, you're saying that artifacts plundered from colonialist rule should then be restricted to the people they've plundered from under restrictive licensing terms?

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/governance

cma2• 6 years ago

In the Us at least that was decided based on the photographer having creative input on composition, etc. A pure scan of someone's artwork I don't think qualifies here.

Some other countries have more of a laboriousness based theory though.

Quarrel• 6 years ago

This doesn't seem like it should be true, even if they claim it.

" In 2019, the European Union adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Article 14 of the directive states that reproductions of works of visual art that are in the public domain cannot be subject to copyright or related rights, unless the reproduction is an original creative work "

and on the digitisation of those:

" UK Intellectual Property Office confirmed that digital reproductions of public domain images are not protected by copyright, arguing that "according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author's own "intellectual creation". Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as "original"." "

Presumably works from the early 19th C are out of copyright?

That said, I am all for supporting the BM- it is an amazing institution..

abetusk4• 6 years ago

This gets into murky territory and I'm not sure claiming their pictures are in the public domain would hold up in court. This is common practice for museums so I suspect there's precedent in their copyright claims.

I would imagine that they would argue that providing digital artifacts in the form of high resolution images or other media (3d scans, say) constitutes enough of an alteration from the original work so as to fall under copyright.

If anyone has any more information on precedent, court cases or the like, I would like to see it.

louislaccanore• 6 years ago

Really cool, always enjoyed traditional Japanese art :)

British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

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