British art historian lectures on the New Year’s Gift
2009.01.22
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Professor Timon Screech of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies delivered the lecture, “The Voyage of the New Year’s Gift—A Cargo of Paintings for Asian Emperors and Kings, Sent from London, 1614,” at Soka University on Wednesday, January 21. Prof. Screech, an authority on the history of art and Japan, used the voyage of the New Year’s Gift, an English ship laden with paintings and other gifts for rulers in India, Indonesia and Japan, to chart the cultural, political and commercial exchange between Asia and the 17th-century European powers. He focused primarily on European dealings with Japan in that era and how its development and future course of history was subsequently shaped. Among the fascinating historical anecdotes that the British art historian shared: The Gift’s captain advised the shogunate to ban Jesuit missionaries from Japan because their peer, Father Henry Garnet, had been implicated in the so-called Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I of England in 1605, insinuating that Japanese rulers could also be threatened. As a result, the shogunate eventually instituted a policy of national seclusion that would shutter Japan to outsiders for some two centuries. |
Professor Timon Screech delivered the lecture at Soka University |
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