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historical notes
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Emeline Stanley Chapman, from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, married James William Johnson (1859-1949), a land surveyor in Riverside, California, in 1891. She collected Japanese prints for over forty years beginning in the 1890s. In 1923 she acquired at a single stroke a collection of 250 prints of fine quality from Mrs. James A. Irons of Laguna Beach. The Johnson collection is well rounded, encompassing works from Moronobu in the late seventeenth to Hashiguchi Goy in the early twentieth century.
In all, Johnson acquired 582 prints and over 100 illustrated books. She divided her collection in 1946, giving some prints to the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum), about 200 prints to Scripps College Claremont California, and about 100 prints to each of her three sons.
The 300 prints given to the Scripps College Collection by Mrs. James W. Johnson and Mrs. J. Stanley Johnson include at least one example from every major artist (excluding the Sharaku prints, which are modern reproductions); over half are by Hiroshige (various editions). The books are also "encyclopedic" in nature; about one-third are by Hokusai and one-third arc Edo period guidebooks. |
