One studio portrait of the scholar and writer Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), likely presented to his patron, Charles Lang Freer.
Arrangement:
Stored in one 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).
Local Numbers:
FSA A.01 12.03.02
Collection Restrictions:
Collection is open for research.
Collection Rights:
Permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from the repository.
Genre/Form:
Portraits -- Men
Photographs
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.