11Story

12 May 2009

The Troll Collection 1886

Made in Japan

Contents - The Early Collections before the Opening of Japan - The Austro-Hungarian East Asia Expedition 1868-1871 - The Vienna World Exhibition 1873 - The Drasche-Wartinberg Collection 1877 - The Troll Collection 1886 - The Siebold Collection 1889     - Este Collection 1893 - The Kreiner Collection 1964, 1966 and 1969 - The Haga Collection 1965 and 1969 - The Kubō Collection 1987−1989 - The Collections of Curators - HARU – SPRING

 

 

The Troll Collection 1886

 

As a member of the Viennese bourgeoisie – his father Carl Troll was a merchant – the world stood open for Josef Troll (1844−1919) to travel free of financial worry.   In 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, he completed his doctorate in Law at Krakow. Fifteen years later he began the first of his numerous journeys, which would lead him through Asia for twenty-one months in 1883-1885. Through the newly opened Suez Canal, he passed the Arabian peninsula, via Malaysia to Hong Kong and Shanghai – he seems not to have visited inland China at this time – and finally to Japan, where he made many stops along the inland sea before reaching Tōkyō.     The 153 Japanese objects that he gathered on this trip form an important part of the Japan collection in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna.   In contrast to the Drasche-Wartinberg collection, with its emphasis on high-quality, individual objects of superior craftsmanship primarily from the former samurai class, the Troll collection is an actual ethnographic collection, in which aspects of Japanese daily life from the period dominate.

 

 

Cosmetic utensils © Museum of Ethnology, Vienna

 

 

A shirushibanten (or Happi) © Museum of Ethnology, Vienna

 

 

 

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