Apollo Advent Calendar: Day 21

Apollo is counting down to Christmas by celebrating some of the greatest acquisitions, gifts and bequests of 2013. We’ll take a closer look each day at one of the outstanding objects, works of art or collections shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Acquisition of the Year.

Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
The Jacoulet Gift
2,950 watercolours, drawings, studies and other items pertaining to Paul Jacoulet

Paul Jacoulet was born in Paris in 1896 but moved to Japan when he was four years old. He is among the few Western artists to master the Japanese art of ukiyo-e – the ‘floating world’ pictures depicting the pleasures of theatres, restaurants, teahouses, geisha and courtesans – that became hugely popular during the Edo period (1603–1868).

Jacoulet’s elegant woodblock prints typically depict the local inhabitants and customs he observed on his travels to Korea, China and Micronesia. The gift of almost 3,000 of his artworks and personal effects, negotiated by his adopted daughter Thérèse Jacoulet-Inagaki, is the most significant in the museum’s history. Jacoulet’s drawings, sketchbooks, watercolours and prints are represented, as well as statuettes, masks, costumes and artists’ tools. After two and a half years of negotiations the acquisition was announced in February, to coincide with the opening of a retrospective devoted to Jacoulet at the museum.