Charles Holme’s detailed record of his travels through Japan, including the homeward journey via the west coast of the US and Canada, is published here for the first time, together with all fifty plates from the original limited edition of his companion Emma Liberty’s Japan, A Pictorial Record, with commentaries. Both diary and photographs provide scholars and researchers with a rare archive. A key figure in Europe’s art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founder of The Studio art magazine, Charles Holme was a significant disseminator of Japanese art and art goods in theWest and was a founding member of the Japan Society in London. Famously, he visited Japan in 1889 in the company of the painter Alfred East and Arthur Lasenby Liberty and his wife Emma, who was the ‘official’ photographer of the trip (taking more than a thousand photographs).
