JAPANESE MASTERWORKS: Paintings From the Indianapolis Museum of Art; edited by Heisaku Harada and John Tadao Teramoto; foreword by Anthony Hirschel; introduction by Christine M.E. Guth; and essays by Tae Nishida, Shiji Hashimoto, Takeshi Nagai and Yumiko Kuniga. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005, 228 pp., 160 color illustrations, map, text in English and Japanese, $40.00 (cloth).

This is the illustrated bilingual catalog for the showings of Japanese paintings from the Indianapolis Museum of Art collection, which were held at museums in Ehime, Shiga and Tochiki, ending their tour in Fukuoka last July. These showings were also a homecoming for the paintings, none of them having been seen in Japan since their acquisitions.

The Indianapolis collection began with the 1903 purchase of three Hachiro Nakagawa landscape paintings followed by the acquiring of several Buddhist hanging scrolls.

Bit by bit, a varied and admittedly eclectic collection was formed, and in 2000 these holdings were considerably enlarged by the combined purchase and gift of almost 80 Japanese paintings from a private collection. The focus of assemblage is the Edo Period (1603-1868).