In 2001 workers were cleaning up the fourth-floor attic of the Hegeler Carus Mansion in downtown La Salle, Illinois, when caretaker Dan Irvin noticed two wooden shipping crates buried under trunks and boxes. “We thought they were full of clothes, like the other trunks,” he says. But when they opened them up, they found paintings, “somewhat dirty, but not too bad–there was a little bit of soot on them.” In total the crates held 27 framed watercolors on silk, standing upright in felt-lined slots. The figures, dress, landscapes, and architecture were rendered in an exquisitely delicate Asian manner, and captions in English indicated these were scenes from the life of Buddha. One titled “Buddha’s Farewell Address” showed the red-robed master sitting before disciples. The text told of his preparation for death and read in part: “Hold fast to the truth as a lamp, and you will reach the very topmost height.” There were no dates, but each painting had the same characters in the lower right corner.
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When Irvin showed other staffers his discovery, they were perplexed. But, Irvin says, they all knew the works were “old and probably valuable, so we took them right downstairs and locked them up.” What were these silk paintings–by all appearances created in the Far East a century or so earlier–doing in a dusty attic in the middle of the Illinois prairie? Their presence, once you know a little about the Hegeler Carus house, isn’t hard to explain. But what remains a mystery is why they were never used for their intended purpose.
Shortly after Irvin locked up the paintings on the mansion’s ground floor, he contacted Blouke Carus, Paul’s grandson. At the time, Open Court was preparing the eighth edition of The Gospel of Buddha, and Carus suspected that the paintings had been intended to illustrate an earlier version. But nothing was known. Several months later, in 2002, a group of Japanese on a tour of Buddhist sites stopped at the Hegeler Carus Mansion. Before they arrived, Irvin laid out the paintings for them to look at, hoping someone could identify the artist. One woman was able to match the characters on the paintings with those in a Japanese dictionary and translated the name as Chuzo Shimane. Later various sources–the tour leader, an art historian in Japan, and Yutaka Mino, then the Asian art curator at the Art Institute of Chicago–provided information about Shimane. It turned out “Shimane” was a go, or pseudonym, adopted at one stage of the artist’s career. He was better known as Keichu (or Keichyu) Yamada. Born in Tokyo in 1867 or ’68, he studied under the great printmaker Yoshitoshi, did many illustrations for publications, and was one of the best-known painters of his time. He died in 1934.
When: Through 4/28: Mon-Fri 9:15 AM-5 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/courtesy of the Hegler Carus Foundation.
