Anonymous, Heian Period (10th-12th Century)

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THE RICHARD C. BULL COLLECTION The Lots offered on the following pages were assembled during the second half of the twentieth century by Mr and Mrs Richard C. Bull. A graduate of Haverford College (1928) and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1931), Richard Bull was in legal practice in Philadelphia throughout his career, apart for a period of service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. An avid collector not just of Japanese but also of Chinese, South-East Asian and African art, he was Director and Vice President of the Chinese Art Society of America for several years. In 1965 he wrote an account of his evolution as a collector and connoisseur for the Bulletin of his alma mater's Museum, starting from an early encounter with a pair of 'turquoise birds' in a Philadelphia antique shop while out window-shopping to relieve the tedium of a lengthy session at the oculist's office and, even earlier than that, a childhood obsession with 'butterflies and moths and World War I recruiting posters', followed by 'vintage motion picture advertising posters' and 'rather more serious affairs with early phonograph recordings and etchings'. Bull's adult interest in Asian art was focussed and refined by the great Hungarian Orientalist refugee scholar Alfred E. Salmony, then Professor of Oriental Art at the University of Fine Arts of New York University. Salmony guided the formation of several famous American collections of Chinese art, including that of Johnny and Pauline Falk which was sold by Christie's in 2001. Under Salmony's influence, Bull acquired significant holdings of Chinese archaic jades, early bronzes and sculpture, including a marble frog 'which would have delighted Brancusi', but during the late 1950s and early 1960s rising prices for Chinese art forced him into related fields, including 'a number of Japanese paintings of the seventeenth century or later'. The Lots offered here in fact include a small group of earlier works such as the sheet of Heian-period print Buddhas (Lot 255), the Kamakura-period sutra cover showing Amida and attendant deities, and a number of works by monk-painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of which the most remarkable is perhaps Kantei's landscape with Mount Fuji (Lot 258). The majority of the Collection, however, dates from the Edo and Meiji periods (1615-1912) and covers the majority of the leading schools. There are works in the Zen tradition from Hakuin, Sengai and Nantenbo (Lots 269, 279, 280, and 307), Nanga landscapes (Lots 271, 272, 273), a group of Tosa-school album-leaves (Lot 273), two paintings by the Buddhist nun Rengetsu (Lots 294 and 295) and, from the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of charming miniature albums by Zeshin and Chikuun (Lot 304) and a group of artists of the Kyoto Nanga school (Lot number 310). Bull also collected works by a number of twentieth-century ceramic artists, in particular the eccentric potter and restaurateur Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883-1959) whose wild reputation is often belied by the surprisingly tranquil and traditional appearance of many of his creations (Lots 327-330). 1 Richard C. Bull, 'The metamorphosis of one collector', Expedition (The Bulletin of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania), 7/3 (Spring 1965), pp. 38-47.

Anonymous, Heian Period (10th-12th Century)

HUNDRED BUDDHAS

Details

Anonymous, Heian Period (10th-12th Century)
Hundred Buddhas
Woodblock prints on paper, mounted as a hanging scroll, old damage and restoration; and a hanging scroll of Kanzan holding a bundle of scrolls, with seal Yamada Doan, old restoration
17¾ x 13in. (44.5 x 33cm.) and 28 x 12¼in. (71 x 31cm.) (2)

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VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium

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