Richard Arkwright, inventor of the Spinning Frame, shouting at his wife for breaking the model, in a Meiji Restoration color wood block.
Japan: Ca. 1860. A Japanese color wood block print, part of a series illustrating Western inventions. The prints are part of the society wide remaking of Japan before, during, and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Japanese became "westernized". This was the period in which the country was becoming an industrial and military power, operating independently in foreign affairs. In the space of a generation, Japanese society was transformed, embracing Western social, political and economic ideas. The prints seem to be pieces of propaganda, intended to teach the viewer how to think about new Western things and spur them to modernity.
This image illustrates Arkwright banishing his wife to her parents because she deliberately broke his spinning frame. He carries a rod in his hand, the broken wheel is at his feet, and she is leaving tearfully through the doorway, a dog just outside the room.
Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792) was a British inventor and entrepreneur known as the "father" of the Industrial Revolution for his development of the modern factory system. Arkwright's signal achievement was the mass production of cotton yarn in the factory setting, through the use of the spinning frame. Early in his career Arkwright made a meager living as a barber and wigmaker, but devoted so much of his time to his work on the spinning frame, that his wife, in a fit of anger over the loss of family income, destroyed his model.
Extensive text in Japanese in the upper third of the print. Certainly not the most sophisticated example of some of the exquisite Japanese wood block prints, but an illustrative one of the period. Printed on laid paper, a bit sunned. 9 1/2 x 13 1/2" Item #21771
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