Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Kōjirō Matsukata collector

Kojiro Matsukata was born into an important Japanese family in Satsuma, Japan in 1865, the son of Masayoshi Matsukata, a prominent Meiji period politician and Prime Minister of Japan. During the First World War, while living in London, Matsukata began to amass an extensive art collection, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tapestries, and his close friendship with noted British painter, Frank Brangwyn, significantly influenced his collecting. Matsukata's collection, partly destroyed in a London fire in 1939, laid the foundation for Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art.

Born: 1865 Satsuma, Japan

Died: 1950 Osaka, Japan

Year of Migration to the UK: 1916


Biography

Art collector, Kojiro Matsukata was born in Satsuma, Japan on 17 January 1865, the third son of Masayoshi Matsukata, a prominent Meiji period politician and Prime Minister of Japan, who was also a significant collector of classical Japanese art. Matsukata pursued higher education in the United States, earning a JD in law from Yale University. In 1896 he became the first president of the Kawasaki Dockyard, a shipbuilding company in Kobe. During the First World War Matsukata relocated the Kawasaki headquarters to London to better adapt to the evolving shipbuilding industry, living in Queen Anne's Mansions, in Petty France, Westminster, London SW1. This period saw a significant boom in the shipbuilding and armaments industries, which allowed Matsukata to amass a considerable fortune.

Matsukata's journey into art collecting was initially driven primarily by his patriotic and industrial ambitions, rather than a personal passion for art. As an industrial entrepreneur educated in the United States, he recognised Japan's need to bridge the industrial gap with the West. He believed that understanding Western psychology was crucial for Japan’s industrial success. His collection, which later laid the foundation for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, included over 2,000 works, encompassing paintings, drawings, sculpture, tapestries, and antique European furniture. Matsukata's involvement in Western art collecting was significantly influenced by his interactions with fellow Japanese expatriates in London, many of whom were artists or dealers. However, it was his friendship with painter Frank Brangwyn that contributed the most to his development as a collector and connoisseur of Western art.

Matsukata and Brangwyn quickly developed a close friendship upon Matsukata’s arrival in 1916. Brangwyn also painted a portrait of Matsukata, now in National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Brangwyn was a great enthusiast and collector of Oriental art, frequently visiting venues such as Yamanaka and Company, an oriental antiques gallery, and Larkin's Gallery on Bond Street in London, which dealt in Japanese prints and ceramics, filling his studio with Oriental paintings, prints, and decorative arts. Through Brangwyn, Matsukata learned about the significant impact of ukiyo-e prints on Western art since the late 1800s. Brangwyn, a member of the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts (RA), was in his late fifties at the time, and his works, particularly his lyrical renderings of seascapes, seaports, bridges, and war scenes, deeply attracted Matsukata. Matsukata was also intrigued by Brangwyn's wartime posters, which effectively galvanised public opinion – an early indication to Matsukata of art's power to influence people. Brangwyn introduced Matsukata to other artists and dealers, helping him to begin his art collection. Through these contacts, Matsukata acquired works by contemporary English artists like Augustus John, Henry Scott Tuke, Charles Shannon, Charles Rickets, George Clausen as well as masters like Constable, R. Wilson, and Turner. Matsukata also acquired paintings by Monet, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Corot, among many others. Matsukata commissioned Brangwyn to design a museum – the ‘Garden of Shared Enjoyment’ – to house his collection and even secured a site in central Tokyo. Brangwyn's designs for the museum were widely covered in Western media. However, the project faced challenges due to Japan's financial crises, which led to the collapse of Kawasaki Dockyard's major bank, and the Kanto Earthquake, hindering its realisation. A total of 12 drawings of museum plans and renderings by Brangwyn have survived (Higa 1998, p. 22). Matsukata, forced to resign as president and sell his properties to support his struggling company, also auctioned off the artworks he had brought to Japan.

A significant portion of Matsukata's collection remained in Europe. Unfortunately, many pieces stored in a London warehouse, known as the Pantechnicon, were lost in a 1939 fire. Until recently, the precise extent and content of this part of the collection were unknown, leading some to refer to it as the ‘illusory collection’ (Japan News). However, a list was discovered in the papers of Arthur Tooth and Sons in the Tate Archive in 2018, detailing almost 1,000 artworks from the Matsukata Collection that perished in the fire. The total appraisal value of the lost artworks is about 2.5 billion yen in today's terms, which aligns with the figure for which Matsukata had the collection insured. Around 400 artworks were left in Paris under the care of Leonce Benedite, director of the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée Rodin. These works were seized by the French government as enemy property during the Second World War and became French possessions in 1951 under the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In a gesture of post-war reconciliation, the French government returned most of these artworks to Japan in 1959. This act facilitated the opening of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, where the returned pieces, known as the Matsukata Collection, were finally displayed. Kojiro Matsukata died in Osaka, Japan on 24 June 1950. In 2019, the exhibition The Matsukata Collection: A One-Hundred-Year Odyssey was held in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Related books

  • Léa Saint-Raymond, ‘From Enemy Asset to National Showcase: France’s Seizure and Circulation of the Matsukata Collection (1944-1958)’, CNRS, Vol. 8, 2019, pp.21-43
  • The Collection of Kojiro Matsukata (1865-1950): The Fire at the London Pantechnicon in 1939, British Art Journal, Vol. 19, Spring 2018, Vol 18, 2019
  • Libby Horner, 'Matsukata Kojiro (1865– 1950)', in Hugh Cortazzi ed., Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Vol. VIII (Leiden: Global Oriental, 2013), pp. 293-302
  • ‘London List 'Completes' Matsukata Collection’, Japan News, 6 September 2016
  • Olive Checkland, Japan and Britain After 1859: Creating Cultural Bridges (London: Routledge, 2002)
  • Yuko T. Higa, The Matsukata Collection - Its History and Significance Today, Thesis, Fashion Institute of Technology, Sta University of New York, New York (1998)
  • Ray Falktokyo, ‘French Art in Tokyo’, New York Times, 21 June 1959, p. 12
  • ‘Matsukata Art Collection to be Returned to Japan’, The Times, 26 March 1958, p. 3
  • ‘Art and the Japanese’, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 June 1928, p. 22

Public collections

Related web links

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Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Kōjirō Matsukata]

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Publications related to [Kōjirō Matsukata] in the Ben Uri Library