The Tales of Ise

Tokyo art market, Japan, January 1946;

Purchased on the Tokyo art market by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1946.

NOTES:

[1] Acquisition documents in the Nelson-Atkins files record that Curator of Asian Art Laurence Sickman purchased this object when he was stationed in Tokyo while serving with the U.S. Army’s Civil, Information & Education section in Asia (commonly known as the Monuments Men and Women) after World War II. The vendor is not named on purchasing documents, but Sickman bought other objects in Tokyo in early 1946 from Michelangelo Piacentini (d. 2005), an Italian art historian based in that city who collected and dealt in Asian objects. It is possible Piacentini was the source of this album, but this has not been confirmed and research is currently ongoing.