Tosogu from the Walters Art Museum

[estcrh]

I just found these several hundred pictures of sword fittings on Wiki commons, I do not know if they have been posted here before.

 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tosogu_(Japanese_sword_fittings)_in_the_Walters_Art_Museum

[Soshin]

Hi Eric T.,

 

Thanks for the link. It has many nice and free examples to study. The photos are good quality as well.

 

 

 

Yours truly,

David Stiles

[Surfson]

A friend of mine and I got "back room passes" at the Walters years ago and essentially passed several hours looking at a fraction of their sword collection. It had been superficially cataloged by another friend of ours, but most of it was uncataloged. There were many many beautiful pieces - both swords and kodogu. I specifically remember an incredible Soshu Sadamune in amazing mounts. He trained with Masamune and trained Nobukuni. It's great that these photos have been released.

[kusunokimasahige]

I like this one very much, but am sorry that many museums in the past thought it fit to paint inventory numbers all over the artifact itself.

 

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... -_Back.jpg

 

I once bought a small collection of surplus lacquerware from the Leiden Museum of Ethnicites and all were written on

small, but still discernible and I would not dare to remove it.

 

KM

[Bugyotsuji]

Agreed on both counts. Some lovely pieces there,

 

The insensitivity of those painted catalog numbers is astonishing. Cultural imperialism or something more prosaic?

[IanB]

Henk-Jan, Piers, Not Cultural Imperial, or vandalism, but more prosaic - simply the need to positively identify the object. You will notice that the painted number is done on a background. That is a readily soluble layer painted on before hand so if the need ever arose, a touch of solvent and all will come off leaving the object unblemished.

Ian Bottomley

[Bugyotsuji]

Ian, your words have absolved the white man's burden of guilt. Many thanks.

[estcrh]

A slight mistake, there are 3,229 images in the category which is badly named (Japanese Armour in the Walters Art Museum) since there are only a couple of armor images, some really incredible images in the batch.

[kusunokimasahige]

Thank you Ian for the explanation

 

However I dont know with what substance the Museum wrote on my artifacts so how to clean them is a mystery. On some there is a clear layer with black ink written on it, but on others it looks like someone tipp-exed over it and then wrote on that...

 

KM

[estcrh]

I am moving the tosogu images to a new category:Tosogu (Japanese sword fittings) in the Walters Art Museum, they should be easier for people to find than in a Japanese armor category.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tosogu_(Japanese_sword_fittings)_in_the_Walters_Art_Museum