One volume, three quarter-bound maroon leather with maroon bead-grain cloth and marbled endpapers. Gilt titles on front board, gilt spine, false raised bands. Bookplate of W.K. Bixby on the inside front board. Loosely inserted in the front is an obituary clipping for Fenollosa. Approximately 180 tipped-in leaves, consisting of the manuscripts of Fenollosa's poetry which would eventually be published as East and West: The Discovery of America and Other Poems. The final 10 leaves consist of Fenollosa's explanatory notes.
Contains manuscripts of his five-part poem East and West: Part I. The First Meeting of East and West; Part II. The Separated East; Part III. The Separated West; Part IV. The Present Meeting of East and West; Part V. The Future Union of East and West. .
Contains manuscripts of his minor poems: Pastoral, December, The Hour, Speak softly, The Dryad, On Opening an Album, The Question, The Snowdrop, Love's Youth, The Golden Age, Sonnet, Sonnet, Sonnet--Fuji at Sunries, Sonnet (She-), Reproach, The Mood Dove, September, New Year's Eve 1875, God's Forests, Music and Poetry, At Her Tomb, In Norway, Telepathy, Reverie, In the Aura, Song of the Wind, In Vain, Karma, Maya, May, With Death, Spring Breath.
Contains manuscripts of his symphonic poem, Discovery of America: First Movement. The Sea and the Sky; Second Movement. Dreams; Third Movement. Wedding Music; Fourth Movement. Triumph.
East and West, the discovery of America, and minor poems
Arrangement:
Organized in one flat box.
Biographical / Historical:
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908) was a poet and student of Asian art. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Fenollosa studied at Harvard, Cambridge University and the art school at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts before traveling to Japan to teach political economy and philosophy at the Imperial University at Tokyo. In 1988, he helped establish the Tokyo Fine Arts Academy and the Imperial Museum, serving as its director. For his many efforts to preserve temples and shrines and their art work, the Emperor of Japan decorated him with the orders of the Rising Sun and the Sacred Mirror. In 1890 Fenollosa returned to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to take the position of curator of the department of Oriental arts. However, his public divorce and immediate remarriage in 1895 to the writer Mary McNeill Scott (1865-1954) led to his dismissal from the Museum in 1896 and he returned to Japan to teach English literature at the Tokyo Higher Normal School. He returned to the United States in 1900 to write and lecture on Asia. His works include East and West: The Discovery of America and Other Poems (1893); Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912), compiled by his widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa; and two works on Japanese drama (ed. by Ezra Pound, 1916).
A former chairman of the board of American Car & Foundry, William Keeney Bixby (1857-1931), like Charles Lang Freer, was an avid patron and collector of the arts. A handwritten note inscribed by Bixby on a flyleaf states that he acquired these manuscripts from a Boston dealer, having become "interested in Japanese Art and in Mr. Fenallosa & his work through seeing the collection of Chas. S. Freer on many delightful visits at his house and from frequent conversations with him [...] I feel that the Ms. of East & West should belong to my friend who taught me to appreciate early Japanese Art." In another inscription, dated March 4, 1910, Bixby dedicates the volume to Freer "with regards of his friend [...] for presentation to Smithsonian Institute or otherwise as he may elect."
Local Numbers:
FSA A.01 04.01
Collection Restrictions:
Collection is open for research.
Collection Rights:
Permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from the repository.
Genre/Form:
Poetry
Collection Citation:
Charles Lang Freer Papers. FSA A.01. National Museum of Asian Art Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of the estate of Charles Lang Freer.
