A Model Japanese Villa.

1899. OGAWA KAZUMA. A Model Japanese Villa. 4 pp., illustrated with 14 hand-coloured collotype plates. Oblong folio, 265 x 375 mm., bound in publisher's silk-covered boards, in a new cloth folding box. Tokyo: Ogawa, 1899. Splendid Japanese photo album depicting Meiji style gardens surrounding a model country villa. This appealing work in a handsome copy represents a rare example of Ogawa's collotype folios. The fourteen plates offer a total of eighteen images, two of the plates each displaying three images. Copies seem to have from thirteen to fifteen plates and varying images. In addition to the villa itself, extensive coverage is given to the landscaped gardens and the select flowers and shrubs therein. Ogawa Kazuma (1860-1929), one of the most celebrated early Japanese photographers and a founder of the first Japan Photographic Society, was introduced to photography in 1873 while at missionary school in Tokyo. He spent three years in the United States learning portrait photography; thus he is considered the first Japanese photographer to study abroad. Slight wear to edges of binding, else a fine copy.