(Picture: Royal Collections Trust)
This exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace is a strange slice of life. It isn’t an overview of Japanese art and artefacts through the centuries; it’s a reflection of those things in gifts from Japan to English/British monarchs and the Japanese items they collected, which has resulted in one of the most significant collections of art from that country in the West.
It kicks off in 1613 with a remarkably fine Samurai armour sent to James I by the Shogun – alas, there’s no record of what that intelligent monarch made of it. Then there’s a gap in the gift exchanges during the next couple of centuries. But when contact resumes in the 1860s with a visit by Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to Japan, the emperor sends another gift of a Samurai armour – and the remarkable thing is, it’s pretty well the same as the 17th century version, only with an intimidating set of whiskers attached.
