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The MFA is home to one of the finest and largest collections of Japanese art outside Japan. Now numbering over 100,000 objects, it was mostly formed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a group of far-sighted Bostonians who traveled to Japan—Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Charles Goddard Weld, and Denman Waldo Ross—and by the leading Japanese art-historian and cultural commentator Okakura Kakuzô, who worked for the Museum from 1904 until his death in 1913.
Our holdings encompass Buddhist art from as early as the eighth century; medieval narrative scrolls; ink paintings from the fifteenth century; masks for the stately No drama; remarkable swords and sword furnishings; unparalleled screens and scrolls, including important works from virtually every important school of painting from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century; and outstanding textiles (click on the Department of Textiles and Fashion Arts for further information about the Japanese textile collection).
Around 80 percent of the Japanese art in the MFA is made up of Japanese woodblock prints and books, including works acquired in Japan in the late nineteenth century and the fabled collection of John and William Spaulding, given in 1921. More recently, Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf donated prints and photographs depicting the emergence of Japan as a modernizing nation, and Leonard A. Lauder presented the Museum with his collection of 20,000 postcards. |
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 | Tôshûsai Sharaku, Japanese, active 1794–1795
The Actor Bandô Mitsugorô II as Ishii Genzô
William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection 21.7241 | |
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 | The Night Attack on the Sanjô Palace
Japanese, second half of the 13th century
Fenollosa-Weld Collection 11.4000
[use C46058 CR-d1] | |
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