TRESSAN Georges de (EN)

Biographical article

Georges de Tressan was known amongst Japanese art enthusiasts as an art historian and collector of sabre guards (tsuba). However, he did not move in artistic circles. In 1907, the Japanese State conferred on him the Fifth Imperial Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his assistance to Prince Morimasa Nashimoto, the cousin of the Emperor Meiji (personal name Mutsuhito), during the latter’s military service in France. When he died on the field of honour in October 1914, Tressan was captain of the forty-first Infantry Regiment. Following the family tradition, as an aristocrat and officer, he gathered information and established a cross-border network of informants. He conducted research in order to elucidate and complete the history of the Japanese arts that were to some extent already being collected in France.  

It was in the 1900 Exposition Universelle that the young Tressan discovered the Japanese arts. Henceforth, he became acquainted with several European collectors who exchanged information by correspondence. Amongst them were Justus Brinckmann (1843-1915), Director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, and Cecil Harcourt-Smith (1859-1944), Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Furthermore, a German collector, Oskar Münsterberg (1865–1920), expressed his appreciation to Tressan in one of his books, in which several sabre guards from the collection of his French friend were presented. In the yearbook of the Bulletin de la Société franco-japonaise de Paris, Tressan appears for the first time in June 1906 (Issue 4). In 1913, Tressan had an opportunity to request information about tsubas and the reference works from Kyusaku Akiyama 秋山久作 (1843-1936), one of the members of the Token Kai刀剣会, a sword society based in Tokyo. The latter was recognised as an undisputed authority on swords and their fittings. Tressan himself was a member of the Token Kai in 1913.

It is important to note that the correspondence with Henri L[ouis]. Joly (1876-1920) stimulated Tressan’s work. A major collector of and expert in Japanese sword accessories, and a member of the Franco-Japanese Society in Paris and the Japan Society in London, Joly produced several special catalogues of the collections of sword fittings in the English capital. In their letters and articles, they exchanged views on the interpretation of Japanese painters’ signatures and the authenticity of certain tsubas, while commenting on each other’s references.

Appointed second lieutenant in 1900, then lieutenant, he lived in Rouen from the autumn of 1902 to the summer of 1906. In August 1904, he married Noël Fanny Eléonore Morillot (1882–1963). Despite the fact that he was living some distance away from Paris, Tressan published several articles in the review Mercure de France, and, in autumn 1905, his first work Notes sur l’art japonais, la peinture et la gravure, and almost six months later his Notes sur l’art japonais, la sculpture et la ciselure at the Société du Mercure de France under the pseudonym of ‘TEI-SAN’. There are letters from the director of the publishing house and the review Mercure de France, Alfred Valette (1858–1935), which were sent to Tressan and which provide insight on the publication of the two books. Shortly after the completion of the second volume of the Notes sur l’art japonais, Tressan was posted to Eu, and a year later, to Rouen. After being a training instructor in the Peloton des Dispensés, holding the rank of trainee lieutenant obtained at the Ecole de Guerre, he was posted to Paris (15^th arrondissement) in 1909, and lived there until the summer of 1912. In June 1913, he became captain of the 10^th Army Corps based in Rennes.

Unlike most of the japonisants (connoisseurs of Japanese art) of the previous generation, Tressan was able to read the language in haikus (Japanese poems of seventeen syllables). He taught himself to do so, undoubtedly out of necessity, because there were titles, signatures, stamps, and authors’ initials inscribed on the paintings, the Japanese objets d’art, and their cases. An understanding of this information is required to assess a work. Tressan used textbooks written by Léon de Rosny (1837–1914), the first professor of Japanese at the École Spéciale Impériale des Langues Orientales, in order to become proficient in ancient Japanese language.

The comprehensiveness and historicity are characteristic of Tressan’s writings. The texts written after his Notes sur l’art japonais can be classified into three themes: the history of ancient painting and Buddhist art; an encyclopaedia of ukiyo-e (Japanese: ‘pictures of the floating world’), or Japanese woodblock prints; and a classification of sabre guards. When he described the development of painting, he used reliable sources, starting with the Japanese journal of art history Kokka 國華, launched in 1889 with the aim of promoting appreciation of ancient works of art, abandoned after the Meiji Restoration (1868). The high-quality chromo-woodcuts and photogravures, as well as the articles by specialists in the journal were a stimulating source of information. With regards to his visual sources, he also used the series Selected Relics of Japanese Art (Japanese title: Shimbi taikan 真美大観), of which 20 volumes were successively published as of 1899 in a format larger than that of Kokka. Each page is followed by a comprehensive bilingual (English and Japanese) caption. Using this deluxe twenty-volume series as a source of information, Tressan wrote two long articles in the Revue de l’art ancien et moderne. Firstly, in ‘La Naissance de la peinture laïque japonaise and son évolution du VIe au XIVe siècles’, the author devoted a large part of his article to an analysis of the history of the Yamato-e genre. Then, in ‘La Renaissance de la peinture japonaise sous l’influence de l’école chinoise du Nord ; du milieu du XIVe siècle à la chute des Ashikaga (1573)’, he highlighted the paintings produced under the influence of the paintings from the Northern Song (960–1127), Southern Song (1127–1279), and Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties. The article covers a short period¾the Muromachi period (1336–1573)¾, during which two of the Ashikaga shoguns commissioned painters to produce kakemonos and screens to decorate their edifices.

In 1912, Tressan published a history of painting from the sixth to the fourteenth century in a general information journal, the Revue des Deux mondes. In the same year, he began contributing as a mitarbeiter (collaborator) to the Berlin journal Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, founded by Otto Kümmel (1874–1952) and William Cohn (1880–1961). In 1913, he wrote and edited a special issue of the journal L’Art et les artistes: La peinture en Orient et en Extrême-Orient with 100 illustrations outside the text and in the text, as well as four colour plates.

In October 1912, Emile Guimet (1836–1918), founder of the Musée Guimet and Vice-President of the Société Franco-Japonaise de Paris, asked his young friend to give a lecture about the foreign influences in the history of Japanese art at the Sunday conference. To prepare the slides  he used for his lecture, Tressan requested permission from the assistant curator of the Musée Guimet, Joseph Hackin (1886–1941), to reproduce photographs taken by the archaeologists Edouard Chavannes (1865–1918) and Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), including a photograph of a bronze statuette of the Buddha in the Musée Cernuschi. Tressan delivered the lecture on 2 March 1913 before an audience of specialists, enthusiasts, and members of his family.

While he contributed to introducing a wider audience to ancient painting, as of 1913, Tressan also strove to broaden his knowledge of the ukiyo-e genre. His study of the global history of the genre culminated in the drafting of a ‘Dictionnaire des peintres d’ukiyoye et de maîtres de la gravure du Japon’, which was published in the Bulletin de la Société franco-japonaise de Paris. A long preface was devoted to all the information required to understand the history of a work, such as the imperial periods, the various names attributed to a single artist, and the signatures, stamps, and initials. The dictionary section begins with the entry Anchi安知 and ends, incomplete, with Bokutei牧亭. 

As an expert on Japanese sabre fittings, Tressan held two exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1910 and 1911. He wrote the exhibition catalogue entry and an introductory article for the journal Art et décoration.

Lastly, in June and July 1914, Tressan wrote an overview of his work for a book that should have been entitled La ciselure japonaise: le décor des gardes de sabre. Tressan’s book would have comprised 349 pages in three parts, as well as eighty illustrations. According to letters dating from 8 and 16 July 1914 (the family’s private archives), the manuscript and the illustrations were sent to Éditions Van Oest. The work should have been published in the winter; however, because of the war and the author’s death, the project was shelved.

Before the completion of his manuscript, he found a recent Japanese book, le Hompō sōken kinkō ryakushi 本邦装剣金工略誌 (A Brief History of Japanese Sword Fittings Artisans) by Tsunashirō Wada和田維四郎 (1856–1920), which enabled him to resolves questions relating to the authenticity of certain pieces. He wrote a long article about this book in Japanese for the Bulletin de la Société franco-japonaise de Paris and the Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, an English translation of which was published eighty-two years later in a Californian journal published by the Northern California Japanese Sword Club.

On 4 August 1914, just after the declaration of war, Tressan left Rennes for the front. While leading his company in an attack, he was injured in battle and should have been rescued by a German ambulance. According to an article in the Journal Officiel (24 October 1914), he ‘repulsed all the enemy attacks for four days and nights and did not lose an inch of ground’. The journal Ostasiatische Zeitschrift (January-March 1915) and the Bulletin de la Société franco-japonaise de Paris (January-September 1916) announced his death with heartfelt sympathy.

The collection

Although Tressan’s collection was dispersed ‘in its entirety’ when it was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1933, we can get an idea of its characteristics through his writings, the sales catalogue, and the historical circumstances of the collection of Japanese objets d’art. The metallic parts that comprise Japanese sabre fittings include the tsuba (guard), the kozuka (a small utility knife inserted in one side of the sheath), the kōgai (a skewer inserted in the scabbard of the companion sword, on the side opposite to the kozuka), and the fuchi-kashira (a combination of a metal ring or band and a pommel attached to the hilt). During the Edo period (1606–1867), in the samurai class and the bourgeoisie, whose members were henceforth allowed to carry a sabre, men of good taste sought ever more innovative fittings. They commissioned an ensemble of fittings with designs that were sought-after and which comprised precious materials. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, tsubas made of iron were primarily imported and collected, because they probably enabled dealers to make a profit. Tressan began collecting Japanese sabre guards at the age of twenty-five. He methodically wrote a description of each piece he acquired (Bibliothèque du Musée Guimet, 70613.113/V). In many of the descriptions, Tressan noted that he bought the object in the shop owned by Florine Langweil (1861–1958). Furthermore, in 1911, he acquired part of the collection assembled by Tadamasa Hayashi (林 忠正, 1853–1906), a Japanese art dealer in Paris who collected tsubas.

His preference for these objects led him to take an interest in archaic pieces, which, in his view,  represented the spirit of the samurai. At this point, he acquired his taste from the same source as the movement that introduced the West to the tastes of cultivated Japanese people in the Meiji period (1868–1912). However, for scientific purposes, Tressan collected several types of guard, identified them, and established their historicity. In every respect, whether in terms of the decorative elements, techniques, or the places of origin, all the types of guard were represented. In Tressan’s collection we find, for example, openwork iron tsubas called katchushi tsubas (armorer’s tsuba), made in Akasaka (a district of Edo). We also find tsubas inlaid with gold from the regions of Kaga, Yamashiro, and Hizen, and guards from the Myōchin, Shōami, and Umetada schools or groups of tsuba makers. He also collected more refined and elaborately worked sabre guards from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as fittings inlaid with gold and enamel from the Hirata and Gotō schools.