19 Facts About Ernest Fenollosa

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was an American art historian of Japanese art, professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University.

An important educator during the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Era, Fenollosa was an enthusiastic Orientalist who did much to preserve traditional Japanese art.

Ernest Fenollosa was born in 1853 as the son of Manuel Francisco Ciriaco Ernest Fenollosa, a Spanish pianist born in Malaga in 1818, and Mary Silsbee, a member of a prominent family in Boston.

Ernest Fenollosa attended public schools in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts before studying philosophy and sociology at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1874.

Ernest Fenollosa studied for a year at the art school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, during which time he married Elizabeth Goodhue Millett.

Ernest Fenollosa taught political economy and philosophy at the Imperial University at Tokyo.

Ernest Fenollosa served as director of the latter in 1888.

Deeply influenced by living in Japan, Ernest Fenollosa converted to Buddhism; he was given the name Teishin.

Ernest Fenollosa was granted the name Kano Eitan Masanobu, placing him in the lineage of the Kano school, who had served as painters to the Tokugawa shoguns.

Ernest Fenollosa was able to rescue many Buddhist artifacts that would otherwise have been destroyed under the Haibutsu kishaku movement.

Ernest Fenollosa amassed a large personal collection of Japanese art during his stay in Japan.

Ernest Fenollosa organized Boston's first exhibition of Chinese painting in 1894.

Ernest Fenollosa returned to Japan in 1897 to accept a position as Professor of English Literature at the Tokyo Higher Normal School at Tokyo.

In 1900, Ernest Fenollosa returned to the United States to write and lecture on Asia.

Ernest Fenollosa died of a heart attack during a visit to London in 1908.

Ernest Fenollosa's body was briefly interred on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery, in London, but later cremated.

Ernest Fenollosa's tombstone was paid for by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

Ernest Fenollosa's widow entrusted his unpublished notes on Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh drama to noted American poet Ezra Pound.

At a Harvard lecture of 2011, Benjamin Elman refers to the Epochs of the Chinese and Japanese Art where Ernest Fenollosa compares "degeneration" of the late imperial Chinese art to that which befell the high antique art of Europe in Byzantium.