The 12 water-color panels depicting Admiral Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in the early 1850′s – the so-called ‘Perry Scroll’ – are well-known and have been a source of interest and intrigue for numerous scholars and students. It was also one of the first items from Special Collections at Brown University Library to be digitized.
http://library.brown.edu/cds/perry/
Acquired in 1965 by Anne S.K. Brown from a book dealer in Los Angeles, the creator of the panels was described as ‘a consummate early painter who had not only seen the sights depicted, but also had the ability to translate them into effective paintings of remarkable interest’. It was also suggested that the work ‘clearly follows the artistic tradition of Shiba Kokan (1747-1818), the pioneer of Western-style art in Japan, and are doubtless the work of one of his disciples’. But who was the artist? The answer has eluded scholars ever since it arrived at Brown University Library. Recently however, a lead has emerged that might possibly solve the mystery.
In 2012, Dan Free, a researcher of early railroads, presented several lectures in Japan, and included a scan of one of the Brown panels (top) showing Perry’s gift of a miniature train. While there, Free visited the Railway Museum in Omiya and was both surprised and delighted to see a photographic enlargement of an original ink (sumi-e) sketch (bottom) for the very same image on display at an exhibition marking the 140th anniversary of the first railway in the country.
One interesting feature about the sketch is that the artist had signed it and added the names of some of the people shown in the image. The name of the artist was Sasaki Reisuke (of Ise) and the samurai/daimyo passenger seen riding on the miniature passenger car was identified as Kawada Yanosuke. This fact alone suggests that the ink sketch is not a copy of the water-color but rather a preliminary sketch.
Further research will need to be undertaken before we can categorically confirm that the artist of the 12 panels was indeed Sasaki Reisuke but this is certainly an important and exciting development.