名品博物館
Meihin Museum
Masterworks from distinguished collections, worldwide.
Catalogue
The collection
The provenance of every work is recorded in the museum’s Provenance Register.
About
Meihin, 名品, is the Japanese word for a masterwork.
The Meihin Museum is a curated museum of masterworks from distinguished collections around the world. Each work is presented with the care of a museum publication and an experience made for the work itself: photographs, film, research into its history, and the work itself, shown in its case.
How a work is presented
Selection
The work is examined in hand and judged on its own merits.
Photography
The work is photographed in the order a connoisseur looks at it: the shape, the steel and the temper line, the point, the tang.
Film
In a dark room, one small light moving along the steel.
Provenance research
Its history read from registers, inscriptions and papers, every statement graded by its evidence and cited, and set down in a Record of Provenance.
Presentation
An essay, the photographs and the record, laid out as a museum publication, with the work shown in its case where it can be.
Opening
The work opens in the museum, credited as its owner wishes: by name, by the name of a collection, or as a private collection.
The museum’s rooms
Enter the museum
The KATANA BAKO cases in the museum’s rooms. Choose a blade and step up to its case.
The Provenance Register
Every sword in the museum has a past, and much of it is still to be found. We look for it in registers, inscriptions and old catalogues, check what we find, and publish it here with its sources. Each record grows as the research does.
Following an old custom, we name each sword in honour of the great house to which it belonged. The names are the museum’s own, and a sword receives one only when its record establishes that the house held it.
Commissions
The same care, for a work in your collection.
Each work in the museum is presented in three ways. The museum undertakes the same work on commission for museums, family offices, private collectors and auction houses: for a single work or a whole collection, and in confidence.
- Provenance research
- We trace the work’s history through registers, inscriptions, catalogues and papers, and set down what the evidence supports in a Record of Provenance.
- Photography and film
- Full-length photographs, the details in the order a connoisseur looks at them, and film of the steel under a single moving light.
- Presentation
- The work shown in its case in the museum’s rooms, to be seen from every side and studied without leaving its storage.
The beginning
The Meihin Museum opens with two works. Its aim is a museum of the great swords and fittings in the world’s collections: each shown as fully as it deserves, and its history set down with care.
This is the beginning. Works will be added one at a time, as their owners choose to present them.
Present a work
If a masterwork in your care belongs among them, we would be glad to hear of it.