Marketing Assistant Libby Whyte speaks with art historian and Japanese woodblock print collector Frank Milner and discusses social history, his collection, and where it began.

LW: Where did your print collecting begin?

FM: I should probably start with when I was first really knocked out by Japanese prints, which was at an exhibition at the V&A in 1973 called The Floating World. I got the catalogue for that. That was just over 50 years ago, but that was the first time I really got interested. Although I was already very aware of Japanese prints through painters from the 1850s or 60s onwards, particularly in France, and how this had influenced their art.

I didn't set out to collect. The first print I bought was a really cheap one, when I was on my way to go and buy a bottle of wine. It was bought in ignorance, but delight. That print actually turned out to be a part of a bigger print – of a triptych. I didn’t know what the subject was, but the print had this huge design on his [the subject’s] kimono of a fish that I liked. So that was the beginning, really, and it went on from there.

LW: What drew you to Japanese woodblocks?

FM: I became very interested in the politics and the socio-economic side of the prints. My first degrees were in politics and so I was interested very much in the mass production of these highly crafted hand printed images, which were immensely affordable, and fairly democratic – in so far as one could have anything democratic in the 19th century.

One reacts to these prints as lovely things; as beautifully composed. But it's a double or treble thing that's going on. I’m more interested in the bigger picture and the “behind-closed-doors” kind of approach. And so, I was on the lookout for things that were revealing of this sort of thing. I would say that eventually it became a really big part of what I was looking for. I think of things like the triptych of a particular play where there’s a group of women watching, and that's one of my favourite prints, one by Kunichika. Do you know the one I mean?

LW: Yes!

FM: When I saw that print, my first thoughts were “there is absolutely nothing like this in Victorian or French paintings from this period.” You’ve got this weird situation where you have a patriarchal society with quite severe constraints upon women, and yet, here we have a girl’s night out at a kabuki theatre, and they're there on their own without men. They’re enjoying themselves as a group and it's being depicted as a regular thing, and it's not. So we have those elements of the unusual coming in that you don't see elsewhere.

LW: How many prints are in your collection?

FM: Honestly, I don't know. I've never counted but it must be about 300.

LW: And are you still collecting now?

FM: Yeah, I got one last week.

LW:What’s the subject of that print?

FM: I am very much interested in people; samurai, sumo wrestlers, actors, women. But then, I realised I really ought to think more about Edo as a city, the biggest city in the world – how did shopping work? And then this print came up for sale. It was affordable and it was of a shop in Edo which is still there now – I can't remember the name of it. It’s now a big department store.

That's the thing about the old and the new. We tend to – perhaps mistakenly – think of the modern as being superior, advanced and all the rest. But you see patterns of behaviour that people have and the association with things that aren’t so different to how they are today.

LW:Are there any specific subjects you’re on the lookout for at the moment?

FM: I'm on the lookout for prints to do with face powder. There are prints which are of actors advertising powder that women would have used to put on their faces and on their necks, and there are prints where they're advertising particular places which produce distinctive products. There are a couple of Kuniyoshi prints in the exhibition which show products in particular places. Sometimes it extended to particular brands, for example, Saki. So, I’ve been looking for prints to do with shopping and brands at the moment.

LW: Do you have a favourite print in the exhibition?

FM: I like the fireman’s wife a lot. It's the one where there's a fireman’s wife looking really fed up and her husband's fire brigade jacket is hung up with his big red brigade insignia on the back. There's a kettle on the right side, and she's got her hands clasped together and she's looking really annoyed, which I'm very fond of. That hangs on my stairwell, along with a lot of others. But that's the one my eyes gravitate towards.