Adolfo Farsari (; 11 February 1841 – 7 February 1898) was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. His studio, the last notable foreign-owned studio in Japan, was one of the country's largest and most prolific commercial photographic firms. Largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities, it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan.
Following a brief military career, including service in the American Civil War, he became a successful entrepreneur and commercial photographer. His photographic work was highly regarded, particularly his hand-coloured portraits and landscapes, which he sold mostly to foreign residents and visitors to the country.
Farsari's images were widely distributed, presented or mentioned in books and periodicals, and sometimes recreated by artists in other media; they shaped foreign perceptions of the people and places of Japan, and to some degree affected how the Japanese saw themselves and their country.
Early years Adolfo Farsari was born in Vicenza, Lombardy–Venetia (then part of the Austrian Empire, now in Italy). He began a career in the Italian military in 1859 but emigrated to the United States in 1863. A fervent abolitionist,Sanders of Oxford, s.v. "Farsari" . Accessed 9 December 2006. Farsari served with the Union Army as a New York State Volunteer Cavalry trooper until the end of the American Civil War. He married an American, but the marriage failed and in 1873 he left his wife and two children and moved to Japan.Terry Bennett, Early Japanese Images (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1996), 44–45; Sebastian Dobson, "Yokohama Shashin", 27, in Art and Artifice: Japanese Photographs of the Meiji Era: Selections from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: MFA, 2004).
Based in Yokohama, Farsari formed a partnership with E. A. Sargent. Their firm, Sargent, Farsari & Co., dealt in smokers' supplies, stationery, visiting cards, newspapers, magazines and novels, Japanese and English conversation books, dictionaries, guidebooks, maps, and photographic views of Japan. The creator of these photographs remains unknown, but Farsari was the maker of at least some of the maps, notably of Miyanoshita (in the Hakone resort area) and Yokohama.An 1890 edition of Keeling's Guide reproduces several maps credited to A. Farsari, and an advertisement in the Guide refers to "A. Farsari" as "photographer, painter & surveyor". George C. Baxley Stamps, Keeling's Guide to Japan. The title page of an 1890 photograph album refers to A. Farsari & Co. as "photographers, painters, surveyors, publishers & commission agents". Waseda University Library; Exhibitions; WEB; Farsari, No. 37. After his partnership with Sargent ended, the company, now A. Farsari & Co., published successive editions of Keeling's Guide to Japan, and Farsari himself wrote and published Japanese Words and Phrases for the Use of Strangers.Dobson, 21, 28. The firm was among the most prolific publishers of materials to aid travellers, having produced its first guidebook to Japan by July 1880.Frederic A. Sharf, "A Traveler's Paradise", 10, in Art and Artifice.
Photographic career and studio
Farsari expanded his business interests into commercial photography and taught himself photography in 1883. In 1885 he formed a partnership with photographer Tamamura Kozaburō to acquire the Stillfried & Andersen studio (also known as the Japan Photographic Association), which had some 15 Japanese employees.Dobson, 21; Bennett, 45. The studio's stock included images by Felice Beato that it had acquired along with Beato's studio in 1877.Luke Gartlan, "A Chronology of Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839–1911)", 146, in John Clark, ed., Japanese Exchanges in Art, 1850s to 1930s with Britain, Continental Europe, and the USA: Papers and Research Materials (Sydney: Power, 2001). It is not clear how long the partnership of Tamamura and Farsari lasted, for within a few years they were in competition with each other. Farsari further expanded his business in 1885, when the Yokohama Photographic Company (owned by David Welsh) folded and Farsari acquired its premises (next door to his own) and moved in.Dobson, 21. In addition to his Yokohama studio, Farsari likely had agents in Kobe and Nagasaki.Bennett, 60. By the end of 1886, Farsari and Chinese photographer Tong Cheong were the only foreign commercial photographers still operating in Japan, and by the following year, even Tong Cheong had gone.Dobson, 20.
In February 1886, a fire destroyed all of Farsari's negatives, and he then toured Japan for five months, taking new photographs to replace them. He reopened his studio in 1887. Despite his losses in the fire, by 1889 Farsari's stock comprised about 1,000 Japanese landscapes and genre portraits.Dobson, 21–22.
Following the innovations of Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Farsari further developed the trade in photograph albums. His studio generally produced sepia monochrome albumen prints that were hand-coloured and mounted on album leaves. These pages were often hand decorated and bound between covers of silk brocade or lacquer boards inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl and gold.Dobson, 15. Like his contemporaries, Farsari usually captioned and numbered his photographs in the images, often in white lettering on a black background.Bennett, 61.
Farsari sold many of these photograph albums, particularly to foreign residents and visitors. He employed excellent artists who each produced high-quality work at a pace of two or three hand-coloured prints per day.In what was probably a veiled reference to the work of Tamamura's studio, Farsari disparaged the poor quality of hand-coloured images produced quickly, saying, "Just imagine, a Japanese paints sixty photographs – very badly – a day". Quoted in Dobson, 34–35. Bennett, 45; Gartlan, 174. Farsari ensured that the colours were true to life and that the best materials were used. Accordingly, his work was expensive yet popular and often praised by clients and visitors to Japan, even receiving a glowing reference from Rudyard Kipling following his 1889 visit to Yokohama."... [T]he best [photographs] are to be found at the house of Farsari and Co., whose reputation extends from Saigon even to America. Mr. Farsari is a nice man, eccentric and an artist, for which peculiarities he makes you pay, but his wares are worth the money...". Dobson, 22–23. That same year, Farsari presented a deluxe photograph album to the King of Italy.Dobson, 27. Dobson refers to "King Victor Emmanuel II", but as Victor Emmanuel II died in 1878, the presentation was probably made to either Umberto I or the future king Victor Emmanuel III. By the 1890s, the studio's high reputation had earned it exclusive rights to photograph the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo.Bennett, 59.
Prospective colourists at A. Farsari & Co. were interviewed by Farsari himself, who ensured they were familiar with Japanese painting techniques. Once hired, they were given unpaid instruction for several months, and then a basic salary that steadily increased as Farsari became satisfied with their work. A capable and loyal colourist could earn twice the rate offered at other Yokohama studios and double his own daily rate for work on Sundays. Colourists also received regular bonuses and gifts. On the other hand, Farsari complained in a letter to his sister that, to motivate his employees, he had to rage, swear and beat them, which he did according to a fixed schedule. By 1891 A. Farsari & Co. had 32 employees, 19 of whom were hand-colouring artists.Dobson, 23.
In 1885 Farsari had a daughter, Kiku, by a Japanese woman whom he may not have married. He described himself as living like a misanthrope, associating with very few people outside of business, and his correspondence indicates that he increasingly hoped to return to Italy. He tried to regain the Italian citizenship lost when he emigrated to the United States, and he even hoped to be made a cavaliere and thereby join the Italian aristocracy. His success in these endeavours is not clear. Nevertheless, in April 1890 he and his daughter left Japan for Italy. On 7 February 1898 Farsari died in his family home in Vicenza,Dobson, 27. four days before his 57th birthday.
Following Farsari's departure from Japan in 1890, his studio continued to operate and even listed him as proprietor until 1901, when Tonokura Tsunetarō became the owner. Tonokura, whom Farsari had known since the mid-1870s, had long managed the day-to-day operations of the studio. In 1904 Tonokura left the business to start his own studio and another of Farsari's former employees, Watanabe Tokutarō, became the new owner, only to be succeeded by the former secretary, Fukagawa Itomaro. The business was finally registered as a Japanese company in 1906 and it continued to operate until at least 1917 and possibly as late as 1923, the year in which Yokohama was largely destroyed by the Great Kantō earthquake. A. Farsari & Co. was the last notable foreign-owned photographic studio to operate in Japan.Dobson, 28.
Farsari and Yokohama shashin Farsari expressed his view of photography in a letter to his sister, writing, "taking pictures is just a mechanical thing." In describing his development as a photographer, he wrote, "I have had no real teachers, I have learned everything from books. I bought all the necessary equipment and with no help from anyone, I printed, took photographs and so on. Then I taught others."Quoted in Dobson, 21.