Dallas Finn Slide Collection of Meiji Architecture

This Collection contains in 24 albums over 5,500 color 35mm slides of Western-style architecture created during Japan's modernization, primarily druing Meiji Period (1868-1912). Taken throughout Japan between 1975-1990 by Dallas Finn, they were research materials in prepration for her book, Meiji Revisited: the Sites of Victorian Japan (New York, Weatherhill, 1995). Though the bulk of the slides are by Dallas Finn, the collection also contains copies of historic black and white photos showing lost buildings, Meiji personalities, and contemporary life. Also includes period photographs of foreighers in Japan and views of the foreign treaty ports Kobe, Yokahama, and Nagasaki. In addition to architectural sites, the collection covers industrial equipment and transportation like railroads, locomotives, bridges, canals, blast furnaces, and textile factories.

Dallas Finn was an historian educated at Radcliffe and Harvard. After living many years in Japan, she became fluent in the language and taught at universities in Tokyo. She became an authority on Japanese design, with a specialty in how Western architecture was adapted by the Japanese. In 1995, Ms. Finn published "Meiji Revisited," a book about how Victorian architectural styles were modified and adopted in 19th-century Japan. She lectured widely on this subject and published magazine articles about Japanese design and historical encounters between Japan and the West.

FSA A2010.03

Finn, Dallas, 1919-2012

Finn, Dallas, 1919-2012

Japan

Asia -- Japan

Architecture

Art, Asian

Gift of Dallas Finn, 2010.

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives

Collection descriptions

Archival materials

Color slides

Slides (photographs)

Dallas Finn Slide Collection of Meiji Architecture. FSA.A2010.03. National Museum of Asian Art Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Dallas Finn, 2010.

The slides are generally organized by prefecture and cities and town therein.

Permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from the repository.

Slides (photographs)

Collection is open for research.