4053 - Japan

Japan Photographer: Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1837-1916). Japanese costume and genre studies. 1870s. 4 hand-colored albumen prints, mounted to card. Ca. 26,5 x 20,5 cm (mounts ca. 60,5 x 47,5 cm), or reverse. Later pencil annotations and inventory labels on versos. These four prints are characteristic examples of Stillfried’s “costumes”: a modular stock of hand-colored genre subjects devised for the high-end Yokohama album trade. Developed during the first years of his independent practice, this repertoire combined repeatable compositions from glass negatives with painstaking hand-coloring by specialist studio staff, giving commercially issued photographs the finish and visual authority of singular objects. One print in this lot, Lady Writing, appears in Views and Costumes of Japan (ca. 1876), whose frontispiece explicitly distinguishes Stillfried as maker of the negatives from Stillfried & Andersen as printer and publisher. – Mounts with scattered foxing, light soiling, handling marks, minor edge wear and slight bowing, some with later pencil annotations; prints with scattered surface marks, fine scratches and light fading; Lady Writing and the standing portrait with localized pigment disturbance along the upper edges, otherwise good tonal prints, overall in good condition. Lit.: Hugh Cortazzi and Terry Bennett. Japan: Caught in Time. Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1994, ill. pp. 97, 105, and 108 (same studio backdrop on pp. 97 and 105).