A surprisingly good bilingual Japanese-English catalogue this for a 2013 exhibition of the artist’s works put on by Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo, featuring 63 oil paintings and sketches by one of the lesser celebrated impressionists, though as the unusually readable introduction explains, Caillebotte played a key role in collecting other impressionists’ works when nobody would give Monet and the like the time of day. As well as reproductions of his oil paintings, it also features preparatory sketches for some of them and close-ups so you can almost feel the brushstrokes. Nice find in a secondhand bookstore in Kashiwa. Some of the paintings that grabbed me follow:
No. 3 of 100 books I intend to read and review in 2020.
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Patrick Sherriff, an Englishman who survived 13 years working for newspapers in the US, UK and Japan. Between teaching English lessons at his conversation school in Abiko, Japan, with his wife, he writes and illustrates textbooks for non-native speakers of English, releases Hana Walker mystery novels, short stories, essays and a monthly newsletter highlighting good fiction published in English about Japan. Saku’s Random Book Club is his latest project to spend more time with books.
Patrick Sherriff 