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After all, this was a diplomatic gift: neither aesthetics nor authenticity mattered. It
just had to look good.
The appeal of pictures at both ends of the England-Japan trade was something
the EIC soon learned to anticipate. We see this in the account topics of the factory
- the term used at the time for a foreign commercial post - which the Company set
up in the port of Hirado, west of today's Nagasaki. These inventories list dozens of
paintingsandprintsinstock.Someweretobeofferedforsale,othersweregivenas
gifts; yet others had to be written off as damaged goods after a voyage. The com-
monest subject of oil paintings at the factory was Venus, with or without Adonis,
Bacchus or Cupid. Pretty women, the English assumed, would always be a wel-
come sight. The factory inventory also included several copies of the king's por-
trait, plus such standard fare as the four seasons, the five senses and landscapes by
the dozen. The most expensive painting listed in the factory accounts of June 1616
was an oil portrait of none other than Governor Thomas Smythe. At the stunning
valuation of £12, the head of the Company cost four times the best of the eight
Venuses in the inventory.
Saris believed there was money to be made in exporting English art to Japan.
While still lingering in Plymouth, he sent the London office a list of English
productsthatwouldsellwellinJapan.Thefirstpartisadetailedaccountoffabrics
- these proved not to be popular. Then there follows a list of other items, at the top
of which is: 'Pictures, paynted, som[e] lascivious, others of stories of wars by sea
and land, the larger the better.' When he repeated this advice before the Court of
Committees later that winter, after the pornography scandal had been put to bed,
he commended battle scenes and avoided any mention of 'lascivious' pictures. But
we know where his taste lay. In his ship's journal he records that in his own cabin
he had a 'picture of Venus hung, verye lasiviously sett out and in a great frame'.
He mentions this in the context of reporting how some Christian Japanese women
fell to their knees when they entered his cabin and saw it. They thought it was an
image of Mary.
In the end, there wasn't much of a market in Japan for European art. Part of
the problem lay simply with the difficulties of keeping artwork clean and dry in
a ship's hold. Two years after Saris's return, the merchant he left behind in Japan
to manage the Company factory, Richard Cocks, wrote back to London telling
the Company not to bother sending any more oil paintings. Not only were they
vulnerable to the shipboard damp, but their foreign aesthetic placed them outside
what Japanese would dignify as art and therefore not worth paying money for.
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