Museum of Montserrat - EN

In the mid-19th century, the opening of trade between Japan and the West sparked a fascination with Japanese culture that became a major component of our Modernisme movement. Santiago Rusiñol was a collector of Japanese prints.

The collection of Japanese prints at the Museum of Montserrat originates from the donation by the Catalan bookseller based in Paris, Just Cabot (1898 - 1961), which arrived at Montserrat in 1962. It consists of sixteen woodblock prints, eight of which are by Hiroshige, the Velázquez of Japanese art. The other eight are by lesser-known artists, yet all of great interest. All of them belong to the 18th and 19th centuries, the golden age of Japanese printmaking.

These are prints in the Ukiyo-e style, which means “pictures of the floating world”—a school that delighted in depicting scenes of everyday life, women renowned for their beauty or fame, kabuki theater actors, as well as famous and popular landscapes, and the vibrant social life of the city of Edo, which attracted a multitude of artists primarily dedicated to celebrating the pleasures of the wealthy merchants' lifestyle.

It is rare to find large collections of Japanese prints in the West, and even more so in our region, which makes the collection at the Abbey of Montserrat particularly noteworthy.