This is the first book-length scholarly study of the career of Yoshio Markino (1869–1956), a Japanese artist and publicist who lived in London from 1897 to 1942, and established himself as a painter and illustrator of urban life in the London art scene in the period leading up to the First World War. In his paintings and drawings he blended stylistic elements drawn from Japanese pictorial traditions (he had had some formal training in literati painting) with Western painting styles, notably those he found in the works of J. M. W. Turner and James A. McNeil Whistler. Rodner's focus on the Edwardian era may seem a little odd, but is justified, partly because it coincided with the most creative period in the career of Markino, and partly because this was a time when Britain was most receptive to the kind of art he produced. He makes a great effort to put Markino in the wider context of the Anglo-Japanese relationship.

Marion Harry Spielmann, editor of The Magazine of Art, and above all Douglas Sladen, the first editor of Who's Who, were the first who brought his work to the attention of the British public. Having mastered the so-called “silk veil” technique, he found delight in painting urban scenes that were shrouded in mist or fog. His watercolors romanticized a phenomenon that was essentially a bad case of pollution. His visual enchantment was apparently reinforced by the smell of burning coal, which evoked memories of his time at an American mission-school in Japan. The missionaries used to burn coal in their homes, and as a result the smoke of coal became synonymous with modern civilization. Another favorite topic was the silhouette of elegant women. Atmospheric effect became his stock in trade, and was widely recognized by the British critics and public as typically Japanese. His illustrations for The Colour of London (1907) consecrated his renown as an artist. In the following years he produced illustrations for books of a similar format on Paris and Rome, while at the same time contributing both articles and illustrated work to various prestigious British magazines. His autobiographical work A Japanese Artist in London, published in 1910, marked the high point in his London career. In it Markino offered what was supposed to be a distinctively Japanese perspective on metropolitan life, which won him recognition among the British public.

The outbreak of World War I put an abrupt end to the pleasant life he had been enjoying in London up to then and greatly affected the sale of his books and pictures, which was not to recover after the end of the war. Anglo-Japanese relations equally markedly cooled, as in British eyes Japan gradually changed from an ally into an imperial rival. After the war he increasingly devoted time to lecturing, writing and staging exhibitions.

Rodner draws on a wide range of primary sources, both unpublished manuscripts and Edwardian commentaries, as well as on studies dealing with the wider context to draw a comprehensive portrait of the artist and the London art scene during the period under study. With abundant quotations from a staggering amount of contemporary commentaries, he describes in detail the networks Markino was involved in, including journalists, art critics, specialists of Japanese and Asian art, notably the discerning Laurence Binyon, as well as collectors of Japanese art.

The author, who is a historian of early twentieth-century British political thought and history, also devotes much attention to Markino's writings, written in an idiosyncratic English, which deal with a wide range of topics, ranging from the English and Japanese theater, women's suffrage, current events in the Far East as well as observations on Asian art and Western Post-Impressionism. The book aims to redress the injustice done to this artist by the neglect into which he fell after his death. This begs the question how important Markino really was in the history of art. Although his work was no doubt pleasing, it was not really innovative. In pictorial terms he combined some techniques redolent of bunjinga and ukiyo-e with specific techniques he had learned in Western art schools. He adroitly used them to depict landscapes, cityscapes or backgrounds that were suffused in fog, an effect redolent of innumerable landscapes in the Oriental tradition. He thus struck a sensitive cord with a particular niche of amateurs and the public. But the attraction was transitory. One may wonder whether his adoption of Japanese painting techniques was entirely inspired by a genuine penchant for the tradition, and not at least partly chosen as an expedient to mediate his recognition in the Edwardian art scene, which insisted on seeing him as typically Japanese, sometimes much to his ire. The meaning of his career may be greater from the perspective of cultural history than that of art history. What emerges is the picture of a Japanese who eagerly aspired to identify with Western culture. He walked a thin line between catering to the British Orientalist taste, which insisted on seeing a typical Japaneseness in everything he did, and his earnest wish to be assimilated to a culture he immensely and naïvely admired. Like so many of his contemporaries, artists and writers, such as Shimazaki Tōson, Takamura Kōtarō, and Kaneko Mitsuharu, he had a great admiration for the West, and sought his artistic fortune in the West. Whereas many of these adventurous men ended up leading a bohemian life in misery and oblivion and could only escape their plight by returning to Japan, Markino was relatively successful and managed to make a modest name for himself in London.

Whether he really contributed to a better cross-cultural understanding is questionable, but if he did it was more by his lecturing and writing than by his paintings and drawings. Just to give one example, in the eighth chapter of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, devoted to the Japanese ethic of “clearing one's name”, Ruth Benedict refers to Markino's autobiography, in particular the incident when one day he confided to an American missionary his intention to go to America. To his unspeakable disappointment the missionary and his wife sneered at him, incredulous as they were about the intention of a penniless provincial lad to go to America to become an artist. This incident became the defining moment of his life. Having been humiliated so deeply, the only way to clear his name was indeed to travel to the United States and become an artist. Markino's essays and articles often deal with contrasting Japanese and Western attitudes and values, and are redolent of what we nowadays would call Nihonjinron.

This study, which includes over 150 examples of Markino's art, all in full color, and which is complemented with an extensive bibliography and an index, is a worthy addition to Brill's series on Japanese visual culture and lives up to the publisher's ambition to present full-color scholarly editions to the scholarly community.