Steve Sly Japanese Works of Art has dated this Japanese Silk Embroidery Textile to the 1890s.
Provenance :
This large and imposing textile has been hanging in an old baronial house in the south of Germany.
Literature :
. However further extensive research on this textile leads us to a company formed in Kyoto in 1898 by the name of Benten Goshi Kaisha, a limited partnership formed between embroidery houses and other traders, apparently partly funded by the Kyoto Hotel Group and in particular the largest hotel in Kyoto at that time The Yaamirou Hotel, commonly referred to as the Yaami, the company was set up at an initial cost of 250,000 Jpy . It is evident that our seal Benten Kyoto is representing this company.
It makes total commercial sense that the finest artisans needed exclusive access to the wealthiest tourists, and in turn the hotels could harness these tourists for longer stays and certainly more profitable visits , especially if between them they had guides working on commission bringing the visitors to the hotel, where traders selling and generally promoting the wares of Kyoto from within their building presumably worked on a profit share basis , a kind of closed shop cartel that benefited the tour guides, the hotel group, the Benten company and the Kyoto economy as a whole.
One of the best known and most powerful Kyoto based embroidery companies was the Takashimaya company, then headed up by the third generation sons Shinshichi III & IV alongside Utako, the daughter of Shinshichi I .
It is recorded in : Threads of Silk and Gold, ornamental textiles from Meiji Japan, Hiroko T. McDermott and Dr Clare Pollard Ashmolean museum Oxford , that during this turbulant period of the Meiji restoration the Takashimaya shop had burnt down, thankfully the stock was in a fireproof store and was salvaged, this enabled Shinshichi II his wife Utako and the next generation of five sons to continue trading , perhaps this fire triggered their investment into the incorporation of the Benten Goshi Kaisha company, in conjunction with the Kyoto hotel group and other selected Kyoto traders. It would certainly make commercial sense, as this would have provided the Takashimaya company with immediate access to highly desirable premises as well as to wealthy tourists, however it is also recorded in the Kyoto hotel archives that the Yaamirou hotel sadly suffered from a devastating fire on the 25th of March 1899, when it burnt to the ground. We cannot be certain of the timings or the collaboration, if any, and it is possible that these unfortunate events were years apart, and under different generations of the Shinshichi dynasty.
What we can say with a degree of certainty following further research of the Kyoto hotel group archives records, is that following this devastating fire some of the most powerful Kyoto businesses and traders submitted a business plan to the mayor of Kyoto to rebuild
Steve Sly Japanese Works of Art has dated this Japanese Silk Embroidery Textile to the 1890s.
Specialists in japanese works of art from the meiji period 1868-1912
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