"Japanese Botanical Art and Illustrations from Siebold's Collection," on show at the Iwate Museum of Art till July 28 (then traveling to Chiba and Tokyo), is the kind of exhibition one expects from a public museum trying to attract and please a wide audience. The creators of this show, it's tempting to speculate, were appealing to the Japanese passion for gardening and flower arranging -- and the affection with which the Bavarian-born physician and naturalist Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) is remembered here for pioneering European advancements in natural sciences in Japan, and for introducing the fascinating wealth of Japanese flora to the world.
The exhibition displays Siebold's collection of the botanical illustrations that he commissioned from Japanese artists and the European copies that were made of them later. The collection was purchased by the Russian Academy through the Russian botanist Carl Ivanovich Maximowicz (1827-91), another important promoter of scientific interest in Japanese flora.
I went to the opening more out of a duty to support the cultural activity of Iwate than a burning desire to see a lot of pretty flower paintings. My skepticism was reflected back at me by a fellow (Japanese) artist I met there who complained that the kind of intricate detail shown in the works is not as technically demanding as the enthusiastic gallery-goers evidently thought it was.