The Shunpōan Incident: Forgery and Ukiyo-e Painting

A lecture on one of the most notorious forgery scandals in the history of ukiyo-e, known as the Shunpōan Incident. It is given by art historian Prof. Dr. Julie Nelson Davis of the University of Pennsylvania, who speaks at the University of Zurich as an Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Scholar in the Zurich Lectures in East Asian Art History series. Drawing on newspaper coverage, trial records and the auction catalogue itself, she examines how in 1934 a private collection of ukiyo-e paintings, including two works attributed to the elusive Sharaku, was exposed in the media as an elaborate fraud involving a family of painters, complicit dealers and a prominent scholar-connoisseur. She also traces how the forgers built their paintings from available print sources, recruited experts to lend credibility, and how the scheme unraveled, with implications for paintings in public and private collections today.