It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll in September, at the age of 85. Dame Elizabeth was central to the creation and development of the Sainsbury Institute. She served as a Trustee and member of our Management Board from the beginning. Close to our founding benefactors, Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury, Dame Elizabeth worked with them to establish our headquarters at 64 The Close. The building had fallen into disrepair and Dame Elizabeth recognised its potential and oversaw its refurbishment for the use of the Institute. With our founding Director, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Dame Elizabeth set up our inaugural partnerships, including with SOAS, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which laid the foundations for our global network of research partners that facilitates so much of our work today.
Dame Elizabeth was the visionary behind our Third Thursday Lectures, which have brought nearly 300 leading experts on Japanese arts and cultures to Norwich and to our online audiences. She regularly attended these talks herself, chatting with our friends, joining our speakers’ dinners, and always ready with some perceptive questions. Dame Elizabeth was passionate about ensuring that the Institute was well grounded in our local Norfolk and Norwich community, beginning with involving the veterans’ groups who had suffered so badly at Japanese hands during the Second World War, and introducing us to her exceptional Norfolk network.
Having served as Director of the National Art Library earlier in her career, Dame Elizabeth was a passionate advocate for libraries, and steered the creation of our Lisa Sainsbury Library, now one of the most significant collections of books on Japanese arts and cultures in Europe. She ensured that we were fully linked into the Japanese library networks in the UK and Europe, encouraging our Librarian, Hirano Akira, to engage fully with the Japan Library Group and the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists, whose annual conference we hosted in 2010.
She visited Japan with us on a number of occasions, helping establish a profile for the Institute in the country whose arts and cultures we study. Dame Elizabeth had first visited Japan sixty years ago in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics and the opening of the shinkansen, known widely as the bullet train: recognised as the year when Japan fully re-entered the international community following post-war reconstruction. While Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum Dame Elizabeth had been a major figure in the first ever Japan Festival of 1991, which saw sumo wrestlers hold a basho at the Royal Albert Hall. At the V&A, Dame Elizabeth came to know Mr Saba Shoichi, President of the Toshiba Corporation who established the Toshiba International Foundation, one of the Japanese organisations which has supported our work and been such generous partners since the outset. Awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays and Neck Ribbon by the Japanese Government in 2005, she was delighted to know that the Institute that she had created is itself being recognised through a Japan Foundation Award and two Foreign Minister’s Commendations in our 25th anniversary year.
Dame Elizabeth was also on the Board of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, where she was Vice Chancellor from 1995 to 1997, and encouraged us to work closely with our colleagues there, collaborations which led to many successful exhibitions, including Kingdom of Characters, unearthed: prehistoric ceramic figures from ancient Japan and Europe, and latterly Japan-themed sections of the seasons on The Nature of Truth and Why We Take Drugs. As well as the Sainsbury Centre, Dame Elizabeth recognised the potential of our working with the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, directed by Professor Steve Hooper, who has organised this year’s Robert Sainsbury Lecture, which forms our October Third Thursday.
All of us at the Sainsbury Institute feel tremendously privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Dame Elizabeth. We will miss her greatly. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends at this very sad time. There will be a memorial service at her beloved Norwich Cathedral on 10 January 2025. We humbly dedicate our 25th anniversary conference at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 9 November to her memory.
This is an extended version of an announcement posted on our website on 18 September, which includes links to interviews with Dame Elizabeth and can be read here.
The Institute was also greatly saddened to hear that we lost two further dear friends in September.
Mrs Mori Mika was a great proponent of the Sainsbury Institute in Japan. She dedicated much of her time to arranging exhibitions of the exquisite collection of traditional Japanese dolls created by her mother, Ohno Hatsuko (1915-1982). In autumn 2012 Mrs Mori brought the collection to Norwich where it was displayed to great effect in the Assembly Rooms, one of our prestigious and historic venues in the centre of the city. During the exhibition Mrs Mori charmed our Norfolk audience with a delightful lecture about the dolls and her mother. The Institute was pleased to be able to help facilitate subsequent exhibitions of her dolls in many parts of Europe, including Spain, France, Corfu and Russia. She was very interested in archaeological ‘dolls’, in particular the dogū of Jōmon Japan. We saw her regularly in Japan, where she hosted us in several of her splendid hotels. I last saw her in 2023 when she had just published her light novel, and we continued to be in contact about the beautiful books she published about the dolls, and the TV show featuring them broadcast this spring. Mrs Mori kindly provided us with a number of copies of her book which contain many beautiful images of her mother’s dolls: please contact us at sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org should you be interested in obtaining a copy.
The exhibition on traditional Japanese dolls made by Ohno Hatsuko celebrated the heritage and mastery of doll making practice in Japan. While dolls in the West are considered children’s play things, Japan has historically considered and produced them as works of art. Ohno’s work demonstrates absolute technical precision and artistic sensitivity. Each doll reveals the whimsical human character with warmth and humour. A review of the subsequent exhibition in Colmar can be found here.
Professor Matsugi Takehiko was a leading specialist in the archaeology of the Yayoi and Kofun periods. Latterly Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History, we got to know Take when he was at Okayama University. He spent a sabbatical at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL in 2005, during which time we co-organised a workshop on Yayoi archaeology. In autumn 2022 he kindly hosted Dr Andy Hutcheson, our Research Fellow in our Centre for Archaeology and Heritage, for a two-month research placement at the National Museum, introducing Andy to many Yayoi sites, museums and specialists across western Japan. Professor Matsugi was an important presence at the Be-Archaeo Summer School at the University of Turin in summer 2023, encouraging the large number of young scholars taking part to develop their interest in Japanese archaeology, and presenting his latest research on the archaeology of warfare based on his comprehensive knowledge of early Japanese weaponry. After the summer school he returned to Europe to join us for our Later Prehistoric Norfolk Project excavation at Warham Camp in north Norfolk in summer 2023. Andy and I met him in Okayama this spring, when we were attending the Society for Archaeological Research 70th Anniversary Conference.
We offer our sincere condolences to all their families, friends and colleagues.
Last month we were delighted to welcome Naomi Collick, Curator at Chiddingstone Castle, to our Third Thursday Lecture series. Naomi provided a fascinating talk on the castle’s impressive Japanese laquerware collection. A recording of this lecture can be found here and a report of it here. As mentioned, the 2024 Robert Sainsbury Lecture will take the place of our October Third Thursday Lecture. Please email SRU.enquiry@uea.ac.uk if you would like to join the Sainsbury Research Unit and New Zealand-born artist, George Nuku, for an evening of art, storytelling and performance. We also look forward to our upcoming 25th anniversary conference, Looking Forward in Japanese Arts and Cultures, on Saturday 9 November 2024. Registration for this event can be accessed here.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director