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Maykova N. Attribution of the Collection of Ethnographic and Artistic Japanese Items MAE No. 2645

Nadezda Maykova
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0002-2816-5769
E-mail: nmaykova@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The article considers the experience of studying the items in the collection of the officer of the Russian army Sergei Andreevich Alekseev. The collection was received as a gift under his will. It was mainly acquired during the donor’s captivity in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, from 1905 to 1906. In the article the author considers possible places and acquisition time of the artifacts, uses archival sources to clarify the attribution, and presents the results of the using modern non-invasive analysis application, such as microscopy, X-ray analysis and UV diagnostics for some of the items. Invasive research methods, as a rule, cannot be applied to museum objects. Non-destructive methods cannot always provide an exhaustive and unambiguous answer, as shown in the example of one of the items in the collection, MAE No. 2645-285. The material of small image of an eggplant fruit has no analogues among the objects known to the author and remains a mystery.

 

KEYWORDS: Alekseev, Japan, attribution, UV analysis, microscopy, X-ray fluorescence analysis, horn, bone, painting, collection provenance 

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-4(18)-35-46

 

REFERENCES

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