The provenance of Saito Gesshin’s Zoho uikiyoe ruiko at Cambridge University Library (2019)
Saito Gesshin’s manuscript of the Zoho ukiyoe ruiko is very important for studies of ukiyoe artists, particularly those of the mysterious Sharaku. Ukiyoe ruiko itself was a complicated manuscript (or rather, a group of manuscripts). There are several versions of Ukiyoe ruiko and they had been used in manuscript form until 1889, when the first modern typed version was published. Of the manuscript forms, Saito Gesshin’s Zoho ukiyoe ruiko was the most comprehensive.
Zoho ukiyoe ruiko had been kept as a personal copy at his home, when Saito Gesshin (1804-1878, a prominent compiler and scholar) died in 1878. In Japan, Ernest Satow (1943-1929) acquired it shortly after Gesshin’s death. Satow was then earnestly collecting a lot of Japanese books, including art materials from the late 1870s to the middle of 1880s, and was particularly active in these efforts in the early 1880s. Satow had a plan to publish a book of Japanese art with William Anderson (1842-1900, a collector and scholar of Japanese art) and he was helping Anderson to collect art works and books at this time.