Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 20. (Budapest, 2001)

Mária FERENCZY: On the history of the Netsuke collection of the Ferenc Hopp Museum - on the Occasion of the Publication of its Catalogue

from the collection was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1908. Nearly a hundred wood block prints and paintings and almost six hundred applied art works were displayed. The introduction to the exhibition catalogue

16 was written by Count Péter Vay. The text of the introduction is identical with the relevant chapters of his book on Oriental arts.

17 He wrote the following in the latter "There is probably none who does not know those charming tiny sculptures that are so widespread all over the world. They exist in every possible form and in various sizes. All of them are knickknacks, lovely toys, yet, they still produce the effect of sculptures. They are so perfectly made, the details are so delicate, the approach of the artists is so serious all of them qualify as works of art."

1K The descriptions of the objects in the Vay Collection's Catalogue were written by Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (1880-1964), an art historian, then a young assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts. According to the catalogue, 33 netsuke

19 in the exhibition were registered as individual items (for example Vay Cat. No. 500 probably is identical with Collection Cat. No. 329, Inv. No. 4352, see 111. No. 4.), but other netsuke appearing with the inrö exhibited were also mentioned. Today these items are also difficult to identify. The foundation of the Ferenc Hopp Museum was a landmark in the collection of Oriental art works, and also in the expansion of collections of Japanese art pieces in public collections. The second half of the 19

th century saw the foundation of large public collections, and middle class people became major collectors in great numbers. With the rise of the middle class, a growing number of people began to travel for several reasons. The desire of travellers for collecting and bringing home souvenirs as well as for furnishing beautiful homes with works of art also grew among members of the middle class. For instance, Ferenc Hopp

20 (1833-1919), a wealthy optician, globetrotter, art collector and patron of the arts visited Japan first in 1883, where he bought lacquer boxes and miniature carvings for his friends as souvenirs. In the same year, Attila Szemere

21 (1859-1905) travelled to the East, where he became an admirer of Japanese lacquer art. At this time, there was a prosperous art dealers' shop in Yokohama, run by the Kuhn & Komor Co. The owners of this shop, Mátyás Komor and Arthur Kuhn, were Hungarians. There are invoices attesting to the fact that Ferenc Hopp bought some pieces in their shop.

22 At the beginning, the most collectors collected everything they liked. Decades passed before the basic criteria for the evaluation of works of art were defined, and specialised, thematic collections were formed. The development of art history as an academic field and the growth of literature on the subject also contributed to this improvement. The collections of museum libraries were already up-to-date at the time, and exhibitions in museums provided samples and material for the comparative study of the subject. A milestone in this process and a further stimulus for private collectors was an exhibition of pieces owned by private collectors from Budapest at the Museum of Applied Arts in 1907. After careful selection, pieces from the collections of 23 collectors were exhibited, arranged in groups by material and technique. According to the catalogue,

23 published in two editions due to great public interest, the largest Oriental collection was exhibited by Ferenc Hopp. The part of the Hopp collection presented there consisted of more than 250 pieces. The most significant part of Hopp's impressive collection consisted of Japanese lacquer works; but delicate carvings, netsuke among them also constituted a prominent group.

24 The netsuke exhibited there became the basis of the netsuke collection of the Hopp Museum later. In terms of the number of pieces, the second most important was the collection of Dr Emil Delmár

25 (1876-1959). The best part of the nearly two hundred items exhibited was sculptures from India and Indochina, but the collection also included Japanese objects, among them netsuke.

26 At the present stage of research based on the catalogue, there is only one piece about which we can establish beyond any doubt that