Portraits of Premodern Japan

This collection of 114 portraits has been collected by the Division of Japanese History of the Faculty of Letters of Kyoto University since its establishment. Many of them were purchased from the late 1910s to the end of the 1920s.
The Division of Japanese History began research on this collection on the occasion of the new building of the Museum of the Faculty of Letters. The results of the research were presented in the special exhibition “Portraits of Premodern Japan” in the fall of 1989 and in “Portraits of Premodern Japan” published in 1991.
The collection was transferred when the Kyoto University Museum, the successor to the Museum of the Faculty of Letters, was established in 1997. In publishing the digital images here, we have excluded copies that would certainly have been made at our university.