Japanese Masters of the Colour Print: A Great Heritage of Oriental Art

FIRST EDITION, published by Phaidon Press, London, 1954, hardcover, illustrated, A4 sized, 158 pages, incl. Japanese signatures of artists, condition: very good.

Folio bound in purple patterned cloth and publisher's dust-jacket. 140 pages. With a foreword and an introduction by the author. Illustrated with 93 images including 20 tipped in full color plates, printed at the Chiswick Press, London. A visual survey of the 200 year reign of the color print in Japan, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The author, Jack Hillier was a British scholar of Japanese art, .He became interested in Japanese ukiyo-e art in the 1940s, when it was at a low ebb in terms of interest from the West. He collected Japanese prints, books, and paintings. Hillier went on to become a leading European ukiyo-e scholar. He assisted in the formation of several collections, and catalogued collections by those such as Henri Vever. He was cataloguer for Japanese prints at Sotheby's for 25 years.

                                      Hillier had his first book on ukiyo-e, Japanese Masters of the Colour Print, published by Phaidon Press in 1954.

He followed with the monographs Hokusai in 1955, Utamaro in 1961, and Hokusai Drawings in 1966. Later books include The Uninhibited Brush (1974), about the Shijō school of painting; The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (1980); and The Art of the Japanese Book (1987). Hillier eventually sold his Nanga and Shijō paintings to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and his collection of books to the British Museum. The Japanese government conferred on him the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette. [ The order is  awarded to people who have rendered distinguished service to the state in various fields except military service.].