Prefactory Notes to Paul Jacoulet
(1896-1960) ポール・ジャクレー

　Paul Jacoulet was born to French parents in Paris in January of 1896. At the early age of six, his father Frederic accepted a post as a language tutor in Tokyo, and so the family was eventually reunited there. Save for several journeys later on in his life, Paul Jacoulet was educated in Japan in music, art, and the Japanese language, and never again left Japan for permanent residence elsewhere. Though his father Frederic was called to duty in the French forces during WWI, Paul and his mother Jeanne remained in Tokyo. Paul Jacoulet was employed as a clerk at the French Embassy in Tokyo from about 1916. Father Frederic died after the battle of Verdun in France. The body is interred in Aoyama cemetery in Tokyo.
　While Tokyo suffered the great earthquake of 1923 and Japan began to engage in the series of bloody confrontations on the Chinese mainland, Paul and his mother Jeanne moved out of the city where Paul continued his studies of painting and printmaking. Jeanne had meanwhile taken up with a young Japanese military doctor by the name of Nakamura, eventually marrying him and finding a new home in the then Japanese occupied city of Seoul, Korea. Paul remained in Japan and under his mother’s auspices and financial support until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. A house was procured for Paul and his adopted Korean family, the Rah brothers, in Karuizawa. That house still stands with its collection of over 2000 remaining prints and original paintings by Paul Jacoulet. His career as an important printmaker began in 1934 with the publication of a lovely print of a young girl of Saipan against a background of a single yellow hibiscus, and ended in 1960 with an Oban of a Korean dancer. Paul Jacoulet died in 1960 from diabetes in Karuizawa. In his lifetime, Jacoulet saw the production of 166 of his designs in woodblock prints, most in full-size Oban, and some others in a smaller size he designed as Christmas Cards, called surimono. Jacoulet’s major prints may be divided into types depending on location of the scene. Most are portraits of men, women, and children from races and cultures that were then on the verge of extinction due to Japanese colonization in the 1930’s: 1.) scenes from the Micronesian islands of Saipan, Truk, Rota, Tinian, and Menado in Celebes, Indonesia, among others, 2.) scenes from Japan, 3.) scenes from Korea, 4.) scenes from China and Mongolia.
　The Richard Collection contains 15 Oban prints and 7 Surimono.