As we walked towards the large screen showing a dramatic night-time scene of cormorant fishing, I thought we were looking at an oil painting. “I also did when I first saw it,” Hiroko said. “I was stunned when I read the label and saw that it was needlework.”

“It is how we started this [exhibition],” said art historian Dr Hiroko T McDermott, remembering the time a decade ago when she first saw the four-fold embroidered screen, pictured above. Hiroko is co-curator along with Dr Clare Pollard, curator of Japanese Collections at the Ashmolean, of Threads of Silk and Gold: Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan. It is the first exhibition devoted to the art of Meiji textiles ever to be held outside Japan. “I came to the Ashmolean in the afternoon after finishing an oral examination here in Oxford,” Hiroko recalled. “As I walked into the Oriental galleries, at the far end of the room I saw an unusual screen. I thought it was an oil painting, and walked over to it still thinking it was. I immediately knew it was by Seihô. I had studied him and knew his paintings well. Takeuchi Seihô is a well-known Kyoto painter, especially good at catching the moment, and painting birds, sparrows in particular.

“I stood looking at it for about half an hour. It was behind glass in a cabinet. Then I read the label and saw that it was needlework! I was amazed. I knew him to have done design work, he had been to Europe in 1900 to see the Parisian fair, and had tried out Western pigments and styles, but not work like this. “This encounter with the screen was the reason I got interested in textiles,” reflected Hiroko, who has degrees from Toyko University and a doctorate from Oxford University, and now is an independent researcher based in Cambridge. Her research has focused on various aspects of Japanese art including Meiji period textile art.

The screen comes from the Ashmolean’s own Meiji art collection, and is thought to have been exhibited at the Japan-British exhibition at Shepherds Bush in 1910.

The current exhibition shows some 40 of the highest quality Meiji textiles from the newly acquired collection of the Kiyomizu-Sannenzaka Museum in Kyoto. “They are extremely rare survivors of an art form that was incredibly popular and influential in its day, the late 19th century, but is a lost art form now,” said Clare. This was the period of Japonisme. In the mid-1800s Japan opened its doors to the outside world after more than 200 years of isolation. Meiji means “enlightened rule”, referring to the period of Japanese history from 1868-1912 when exquisite embroideries, resist-dyed silk and velvet panels, tapestries, prints and other decorative arts flooded into European and American markets, designs adapted to please Western tastes.

Fashionable magazines carried advice on how to use Japanese textiles in the home; international exhibitions had Japanese stands showing off art objects to an amazed public; and painters and designers were influenced by the Eastern aesthetic and techniques.

“This is a one and only chance to see this collection before it goes back to its home in Kyoto,” said Dr Christopher Brown CBE, director of the Ashmolean.