IT was stored away in the owner’s bedsit for 40 years after he had bought it for just £55.

That exquisite, painted scroll that Israel Goldman picked up in the early Eighties was the start of what is now the world’s greatest collection of work by Kawanabe Kyosai, a celebrated 19th-century Japanese artist whose work is credited with inspiring the modern “manga” comic style.

Scroll

The scroll Daruma, Mr Goldman's first buy

American collector Mr Goldman has amassed more than 1,000 of the artist’s works, some of which are now on show at a new exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. The total value of Mr Goldman’s collection is unknown.
In 2013, a single work by Kyosai was sold at Christie’s for just under $1million.

That first work he bought, Daruma (“perseverance”), is now estimated to be worth £75,000.

He had originally hoped to sell it for a quick profit, but changed his mind. He told the JC: “I loved it so much I knew I could never sell it. But if you were to tell me then I would own more than 1,000 pieces by this artist, I would never have believed it.”

Kyosai’s humorous observations on society were irreverent enough to land him in jail.

Kyosai frog battle

Wild imaginings: Battle Of The Frogs, colour woodblock print from 1877

He fell out of fashion after his death in 1889 but is immensely popular once more, perhaps thanks to the rise of Japanese comic culture. “Those who call Kyosai the father of manga and anime are right, and he’s been a huge influence on tattoo artists,” said Goldman, citing the artist’s tooth-baring tigers, skeletons, ghosts, frogs and demons as being particularly popular in inking parlours.

Now a resident of Hampstead in North London, Goldman grew up in Kansas City, the son of academics. His life changed after his parents moved the family to London on a sabbatical when he was 11.

He said: “We spent every weekend in museums and I spent my pocket money on Japanese prints from Jack Sassoon’s gallery round the corner from where we were staying.”

He settled in London for good after graduating with a history of art degree from Harvard.

Israel Goldman

Art dealer Israel Goldman

In 1980s London, young Goldman scraped a living the way many art dealers start — “buying stuff to sell on quickly”.

When a work by Kyosai caught his eye in 1983, he did his homework. “I researched the artist at the V&A and when I saw the picture in a monograph I knew for sure it was genuine,” he said.

Expecting it to go for a thousand or two, he got a backer to help him acquire it but ended up buying the hanging scroll titled Daruma for a steal instead.

“The picture filled my little bedsit with so much power and vigour when I unrolled it, I knew I couldn’t bear to sell it,” he said.

Over the next decade, he acquired dozens more works by an artist he says has been “under-appreciated and undervalued until only really the past decade”, though he did sell some of them as “the goal was not to have a collection, just to make a go of being a dealer”.

In 1993 the British Museum asked to borrow some of his Kyosai works. The entire collection is now there on long-term loan. “It’s safe and accessible to the public by appointment,” Goldman said.

Now that Kyosai has regained his reputation as Japan’s most important 19th-century artist — a political satirist like Hogarth as well as a creator of fantastical creatures — Goldman would like to see his collection exhibited in his native country.

While Americans have been slow to catch on to the artist’s renaissance in popularity, the Israelis have not; there are Kyosais, said Goldman, hanging at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Haifa.

Two of the artist’s favourite motifs are crows and frogs. Goldman said he can’t look at either without thinking of Kyosai: “It’s like looking at a dramatic sky and not thinking of Turner.”

Kyosai: The Israel Goldman Collection shows at Royal Academy until 19 June