Yoshio Markino (Japanese, 1870-1956) The Monkey House fashio...

Estimate

£2,500 - £3,500

Yoshio Markino (Japanese, 1870-1956) The Monkey House fashionable crowd at London Zoo, Regent's Park bearing calligraphic monogram lower right watercolour on paper 30 x 24cm Provenance: Private Collection Published: W.J. Loftie and Yoshio Markino (illustr.) THE COLOUR OF LONDON, historic, personal & local (first published London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), p. xxxi William S. Rodner, Edwardian London Through Japanese Eyes The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897-1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 111 Born in Koromo (Toyota City) Japan, and trained at Hopkins Art School in San Francisco, Yoshio Markino settled in London in 1897, and would remain there for most of his life. He was enamoured by the striking visual effects of the city's ubiquitous smog, fog and gaslight, and spent many of his days walking around the city and observing and sketching. Markino's illustrations for Loftie's book The Colour of London, in which the present lot was also published, were his first critical success. Markino's keen interest in observing the people of London is evident from his commentary on the present sketch. In his opening essay to The Colour of London, Markino writes of this watercolour: 'In this book I give a sketch of a ''Monkey House''' I went to the ''Zoo'' and finished the people first; when I wanted to put in the monkeys, I forgot their shapes and colours. I went to the Natural History Museum, which is only five minutes' walk. I looked at them. They are dead. They don't give any movement at all. So I had to journey to the zoo and study them from life again.' Works by Markino are held in the Royal Collection, the Museum of London and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.