Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea

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6미술사와 시각문화 2020년 | 제25호
I. Introduction
Elizabeth Petrie Keith (1887/8-1956) is a British artist whose Japanese-style
colour prints of East Asian subjects have once gripped the visual imagination
of art lovers (Fig. 1). At her prime in the 1930s, she was even ranked in the
same league as Hiroshige (歌川広重) and Hokusai (葛飾北斎), the eminent
old masters of Japanese Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), by an art critic for the Studio
magazine, one of the most popular art periodicals in Britain and USA during
the inter-war years.1 Her fame and popularity, however, had drastically
declined since World War II until a major exhibition held in 1991 in
Pasadena, California, shed some retrospective light on Keith the printmaker.2
Little, nevertheless, is still known about Keith.3 To make matters worse,
much factual information currently available on her is either inaccurate or
unreliable, due mainly to the absence of proper documentation. Even the
exact year of her birth, for example, is still uncertain: while a respectable
dictionary of artists informs its readers that she was born on 30 April 1887, a
recent website for British artists’ biography presents her birth year as 1888.4
Based largely on newly discovered contemporary sources such as
newspapers and hitherto unpublished correspondence, this article has two
overlapping aims. First, it seeks to rectify unscrupulous Korean scholarship
on Keith by providing a solid factual account of Keith’s life in broadly
chronological order.5 Second, it attempts to highlight her relations with
전동호｜錢東嘷
이화여자대학교 인문과
학대학 미술사학과 부
교수. 영국 맨체스터
대학교(University of
Manchester)에서 근대 영
국미술사로 박사학위를 받
았다. 최근 논저로는 “The
Battle of Representations:
Gazing at the Peace
Monument or Comfort
Women Statue” (2020) 와
「내수용 서양미술사의 빛
과 그림자」 (2019)가 있다.
Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
https://doi.org/10.22835/ahvc.2020..25.001

7Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
Korea: not only was her career as a popular printmaker
made possible thanks to her early depiction of Korean
subjects but later in life she devoted her energy to
producing an illustrated book on Korea, one of only two
books she has ever published during her life.6 This study,
however, does not aim to offer a detailed analysis of
specific images she has produced, as it would constitute
a subject for a different line of investigations.7
II. Life before Encountering the Far East
Elizabeth Keith was “born into a large Aberdeenshire
family of marked individualities.”8 Her father, George
Keith, was a customs officer and had five daughters of whom Elizabeth was
the youngest.9 She also had at least one brother as mentioned in her letters
to her most devoted patron, Gertrude Warner (1863-1951).10 In fact, the
sisterhood among the Keith girls was strong and persistent. Above all, it was
the second sister, Elspet, who introduced Elizabeth to the Far East by inviting
her to Japan in 1915 when her journalist husband, J. W. Robertson Scott,
moved to Tokyo to set up a monthly English magazine called the New East.11
When Elizabeth returned finally to England in 1937, it was Elspet and her
husband who took her again under their wings, and she settled, after a short
stay in London, in their house in Oxfordshire until her last days. She was also
close to her fourth sister Jessie, who came to Japan and stayed with her for
several years in the 1930s. After all, Elizabeth, unmarried, bequeathed her
entire estate, valued at £7,752, to Jessie and the third sister Rachel in her last
will made in 1950.12
Virtually nothing is known of Elizabeth Keith’s childhood and early
adulthood. Her obituary writer in The Times, who was unnamed but simply
identified as an old friend, did not mention anything about her life until 1915
when she accompanied Elspet and her husband to Japan.13 This silence may
Fig. 1 Elizabeth Keith
holding an exhibition at the
Imperial Hotel
1935, as published in
The Japan Times
(Tokyo:
November 20, 1935), n.p.
(photograph published under
fair use)

8
be indicative of the plausibility that there was nothing notable in Keith’s life
until she was at least twenty-seven years of age. It is also likely that she did
not have a decent job; that explains why she followed her sister to Japan at a
time when it took a few months to travel between Britain and Japan. Elizabeth
and her immediate elder sister Jessie remained single throughout their
lives.14 Although it is pointless to conjecture why they were unmarried, they
belonged to the generation called the ‘surplus women,’ those British women
born between 1885 and 1905 who could not or did not get married for the
shortage of suitable men.15 What was more relevant in Keith’s obituary than
her possible unemployment up to 1915 was the fact that “her sketching had
been for her own and the family’s entertainment, though she had spent a few
weeks at a life school.”16 Keith’s lack of adequate art education is corroborated
in a review on her colour print in a London newspaper, where the reviewer
simply comments in 1925 that “Elizabeth Keith is of Scottish birth, but she had
an early art training in London before proceeding to the Far East,” with no
further specification.17 If she had attended a professional art school, it would
have been duly noted. Keith, in all likelihood, was a mediocrity with little
serious training in art before setting foot in Japan in 1915.
III. The Making of an Artistic Identity in the Far East
Unexpected as it was, Japan became Keith’s second home. She originally
planned to stay in Japan for two months but “the visit changed the entire
course of her life.”18 While her brother-in-law and sister returned to England in
1921, Elizabeth stayed in Japan until 1924.19 She came back to Japan in 1929
and remained there until the end of 1936.20 Japan was a kind of base for her
frequent excursions to other East Asian countries, and yet she appears to have
maintained a relatively sheltered life orbiting around a colony in Tokyo of
Western expatriates and some prominent Japanese concerned with the West.21
Despite her prolonged stay in Japan, she possessed “practically no knowledge
of Japanese but she went everywhere,” as testified by an English friend who

9Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
was born and raised in Japan.22
Among the many places she went was Korea. Formally annexed in 1910,
Korea at the time was part of the Japanese empire, and Keith recollected in
1954 that her first visit to Korea was just a “chance.”23 Elizabeth and Elspet
arrived in Korea at the end of March or early April of 1919, “about a month after
the Independence Movement demonstrations throughout the country.”24 They
travelled the country widely and afterwards Elizabeth paid numerous visits to
Korea while she was living in Japan (Keith 1928, 15).25 During her first travel to
Korea for a few months in 1919, Elizabeth made a number of sketches.26 After
returning to Japan, she organised an exhibition. In the introduction to her first
book Eastern Windows, an edited collection of her letters concerning her travels
in East Asia, Keith recalls that:
a few years ago in Tokyo I held an exhibition of water-colour sketches
portraying the everyday life of the Koreans. It was the first exhibition of Korean
subjects ever held there. The leading colour printer, then a stranger to me,
came to the exhibition and strongly advised me to have my water-colour of
East Gate, Seoul, by Moonlight, made into a colour-print (Fig. 2). He declared
that it would be a great success. I took his advice and he was right, for that
Fig. 2 Elizabeth Keith,
East
Gate, Seoul
1921, woodblock print, 31.3×
44.5cm. Freer and Sackler
Galleries, Washington, D.C.
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by
Google Arts & Culture)

10
subject is still the most popular of my prints.27
This exhibition must have been the one held at Mitsukoshi department
store in Tokyo in May 1920 and it contained “WATERCOLORS of Japan,
Korea and Hokkaido by Miss Elizabeth Keith, SCULPTURE by Miss E.
Tcheremissinof, PRINTS by Mr. C. W. Bartlett.”28 It was neither solely devoted
to Keith’s work nor did her productions deal exclusively with Korea as her
recollection might suggest, but among the exhibits only Keith’s Korean
subjects were singled out for praise in a contemporary review: “‘Seoul-the
South Gate’ is a beautiful example of what she can do with landscape, while
‘An old Korean Smoking’ is a masterpiece in characterization and artistic
composition.”29
Difficult as it is now to verify if this was really “the first exhibition of
Korean subjects ever held” in Japan as Keith claimed, it is worth pondering
why only Korean subjects received particular attention at the exhibition. Some
ethnographic interest in Korea might have played a role, and there is no
doubt that some Western collectors found great ethnographic value in Keith’s
oriental prints as the Bishop Museum in Honolulu bought a complete set of
Keith’s prints “due to their ethnographical as well as artistic interest.”30 Ten
years, however, had already passed since Korea became a Japanese colony
when the exhibition was on show in 1920. Pure ethnographic curiosity about
Korea would have subsided in those ten years. I would like to argue, instead,
that the timing of the exhibition was crucial: it happened only one year after
Samil Movement, the Korean Independence Movement of 1 March 1919,
had taken place. In the wake of popular uprisings all over Korea following
the movement and of subsequent Japanese crackdowns on them, substantial
international as well as Japanese domestic attention was being paid to Korea.31
In these circumstances, Keith’s Korean subjects of tranquil antiquity, not of
contemporary turbulence, must have been soothing for sensitive Japanese
nerves. In fact, Keith has never drawn any Westernised aspects of Korea,
while in reality urban towns in Korea underwent rapid modernisation under
the Japanese colonial rule.32 A collection now in the National Museum of

11 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
Modern Art in Tokyo is an interesting signifier in this context. It consists of
nine colour prints of Korean subjects by Keith made in the early 1920s which
were donated by a Japanese man named Sato Fujikake in 1960.33 Considering
that Keith eventually produced more than 100 colour prints of various East
Asian subjects throughout 1920-30s among which only about thirty percent
concerned Korea, it seems evident that Sato collected only Keith’s early
production of Korean subjects.34 Why did he, then, collect Keith’s prints of
Korean subjects produced in the early 1920s, and not others? The definite
answer is likely to remain permanently elusive but it may well have something
to do with the delicate colonial situation involving Korea’s Independence
Movement and its aftermaths in the early 1920s.
The leading colour printer Keith refers to is Watanabe Shozaburo (渡
辺庄三郎), a Japanese publisher of colour prints, who has been widely
regarded as the founder of the Shin-hanga (新版画), that is, New Print.35 It
is almost common knowledge now that Japanese traditional colour prints
known as Ukiyo-e fascinated Western artists and public alike in the late
nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, the Western
enthusiasm for Ukiyo-e dwindled. Somewhat dissatisfied with conventional
Ukiyo-e production and determined to regain Western print market, Watanabe
employed a series of artists, both Japanese and Western, to create designs
for colour prints that combined traditional Japanese woodblock skills with
new sensibilities. Keith, however, was not the first British designer who
collaborated with Watanabe, let alone the first Western artist active in Japan.
Watanabe had already worked with the English painter Charles Bartlett in
1916 to produce twenty-two prints of Bartlett’s Indian and Japanese subjects.36
It was Watanabe the businessman who saw the potential marketability of
Korean subjects, and he advised Keith to turn her watercolours into colour
prints. A contemporary Japanese newspaper reports the case succinctly:
“Miss Keith was the first to make modern Korea a subject of colour prints, at
the suggestion of Mr. Shozaburo Watanabe, the publisher and authority on
Edoe.”37 Accordingly, a private exhibition and a large public show “of Miss
Elizabeth Keith’s colour prints of Korean subjects” were held in June 1921

12
in Tokyo. Hence started a long and productive collaboration between Keith
and Watanabe, and in their cooperation Keith was basically a designer who
provided sketches for woodblock prints while the actual cutting and printing
of woodblocks were done by Watanabe’s Japanese artisans in accordance
with old Japanese tradition. Keith always supervised them carefully and often
intervened in the process of printing. According to Watanabe, “she was the
only foreigner who really mastered the art of color printing in the traditional
Japanese manner.”38 He continued to comment on Keith’s fastidious control
over the production of her designs into prints: “she was very particular about
colors and if she did not like the completed prints she tore 10 or even 50
sheets of prints and had them remade.”
In fact, Keith’s pride as an artist was extremely serious and Sherwood
Hall (1893-1991), a Canadian medical missionary who worked in colonial
Korea, took particular note of it. When he had to deal with the Japanese
military demand to alter the background of the design for the 1940 Christmas
seal he was planning to issue in Korea, he recalls:
A more difficult task now facing me was that of persuading a very sensitive
artist like Miss Keith to change her design ... As I had predicted, though I
tried to use my most diplomatic approach, Miss Keith was simply furious. I
experienced considerable difficulty in calming her. In fact, I was about to give
up and secure another artist when she consented to change the background.
She did so with the utmost reluctance and only for the sake of the cause. But
she added emphatically, “I shall not allow my initials to appear on the revised
seal design.” To this I had to agree.39
As mentioned earlier, Keith produced other East Asian subjects apart
from Korean ones. It was the depiction of Korean subjects, however, that
catapulted her into the world of colour print, thus initiating her future as a
printmaker. In addition, Keith’s early prints of Korean subjects were popular
not just in Japan but also in the United States: her colour print of 1921,
Korean Scholar (Fig. 3), was “accepted by the International Colour Print

13 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
Exhibition held in New York” in May 1922.40 These
instances help to explain why she stated in her
introduction to her book, quoted previously, that
the watercolour exhibition of 1920 in Tokyo was
“the first exhibition of Korean subjects ever held.”
Regardless of the truthfulness of the statement, this
retrospective insistence on originality functions to
assure her self-proclaimed aura as a leading artistic
authority on Korea. Later she repeated a similar
claim for her role as a pioneering Western artist in
exploring Korean subjects, “I cannot understand
why more of the many artists who have visited the
Far East have not been tempted to make studies
in Korea. I was the first in my time; several others
followed me afterwards.”41
After her debut exhibitions of colour prints
devoted to Korean subjects in June 1921 in Tokyo, another show immediately
followed in September, this time not in Japan, but in Korea: a contemporary
Korean daily newspaper announced an exhibition of Keith’s Korean
watercolours and prints in Seoul.42 It turned out to be popular as Elizabeth
herself wrote to Elspet:
my first show of pictures here in Seoul has been an astounding success.
Everybody came to it, from the wife of the Governor-General to the school
children. By the end of the day the place was redolent of kimtchi! What
better testimony of Korean interest can there be? ... Many of the Koreans
were a bit bewildered at getting a glimpse of themselves as others see
them.43
In addition, a Western female artist sketching Korean scenes and
personalities was definitely a source of great curiosity for Koreans themselves
as Elizabeth’s sister Jessie related: “while her sister sketched, crowds of
Fig. 3 Elizabeth Keith,
Korean Scholar
1921, woodblock print, 45×
31.7cm. Freer and Sackler
Galleries, Washington, D.C.
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by
Google Arts & Culture)

14
Koreans would crowd around to watch her,”44 and it became Jessie’s job
to keep the eyeing Koreans away. “She would run from side to side and
while she was at one side they would crowd around the other side.” Keith’s
evocative depictions of Korea seem to have been especially popular with
Korean expatriates, undoubtedly for nostalgic reasons. It is reported, for
example, that a young Korean man living in Honolulu “loved and admired
Miss Keith so much because of her wonderful understanding of the Korean
people that he had changed his name to Keith.”45
Beguiled and bewildered as Koreans may have been, few of them seem
to have actually purchased Keith’s prints portraying their own nature and
culture, judging from the fact that Keith held only one more exhibition in
Korea in February 1934.46 As she gave a number of exhibitions in Japan and
China in the 1920-30s, the scarcity of her exhibitions in Korea may seem
disappointing.47 From the business perspective, however, it must have been
a clever decision on the part of Keith and her dealers because far bigger
clientele existed in Japan and China than in Korea.
Keith’s representations of Korean subjects, however, were not exact
rendering of what she encountered every day in Korea. Most of them were
deliberately antiquated; her scenes and sitters were all carefully selected and
staged for Western and touristic gazes that looked constantly for something
exotic. For instance, Keith tenaciously pestered an old Korean nobleman
sitting for her to put on his ancient court dress he did not wear in daily life.48
In another occasion, she lured a Korean apothecary into posing for her and
asked him to put on a traditional military costume, but he became annoyed
and retorted, “my father might have worn such a dress as that, but certainly
I will not!”49 Even in choosing scenic sites to draw, she focused on old gates
and temples, not the modern cityscape of Seoul. In addition, she produced
several prints showing different spots from the Diamond Mountains in now
North Korea, an area traditionally noted for its picturesque beauty (Fig. 4).
Her depictions of the famous locality differed radically from conventional
Korean representations in terms of iconographic details, but it was a locality
then being fervently promoted by the Japanese colonial authorities and private

15 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
developers as “the future vacation land of the Far
East.”50
Keith, of course, was not the first Westerner
to visit and record Korean scenes and customs.
Many European and American citizens had visited
Korea and left their impressions in the form of travel
literature, photographs, and sometimes pictures well
before Keith ever set foot on Korean soil.51 More to
the point, there were already a few American female
printmakers specializing in East Asian subjects. Coming
from different backgrounds, they had been living in
Tokyo when Keith came to Japan and they knew
one another’s work. And some of them had already
produced prints concerning Korea although they were
not widely circulated.52 Lillian Miller (1895-1943),
in particular, who was born in Japan and whose
father served as the American Consul General in
Seoul, visited Korea in 1917 and produced from 1918
onwards a number of paintings and prints depicting
Korean customs and scenery.53 Although it is not my
intention in this article to compare Keith’s career with
Miller’s, it must be pointed out that contrary to Keith’s own claim of originality
as noted previously Keith was not unique in covering Korean subjects in
print at the time. Moreover, Keith and Miller knew each other, and their
rivalry was sometimes intense.54 Nonetheless, the novelty effect of a female
British artist working in ancient Japanese medium attracted much attention
in contemporary British media. As a result, she was hailed as someone
who seemed, “partly through intuition and partly through skill, to have
rediscovered the Japanese tradition of woodblock prints.”55
As mentioned earlier, Keith’s first sojourn to East Asia lasted from 1915
to the end of 1924. It is not entirely clear why she left Japan: perhaps, she
became homesick. The experience of witnessing the aftermath of Great Kanto
Fig. 4 Elizabeth Keith,
Diamond Mountains, Korea,
A Fantasy
1921, woodblock print, 36.5×
17.5cm. Freer and Sackler
Galleries, Washington, D.C.
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by
Google Arts & Culture)

16
Earthquake of 1923 may also have played a role because she expressed her
fear of such a disaster in her letter of June 1927 to Warner: “I had not the nerve
to go to Japan so soon after that earthquake in Kobe,” referring to another
earthquake in March 1927.56 While back in Europe, she decided to learn the
art of etching, a method of making print on copper plate, not on woodblock.
She went to France in 1927 and “stayed at Fontainebleau for 3 months & had
some lessons from an old engraver in etching” because her agent in England,
the Beaux Arts Gallery, asked her “to do colour etching” since she was “so well
known in colour.”57 She sent her first two etchings to a French exhibition and
“they were both accepted.”58 Thus began her career as an etcher as well, but
she did not enjoy the practice of etching as is evident from her letter to Warner, “I
wish I could afford to paint & not have to do all the terrible drudgery of
etching, colour etching more especially. It is terrifically hard work.”59 Warner
had some reservations on Keith’s spending too much time on etching, giving
some advice in her letter to Keith: “while I like the colour etchings very much
and they have their place, I hope you will not forsake the colour print making
since you have reached the top of the ladder.”60
IV. Back in East Asia and Back to Europe
Keith came back to Japan in February 1929.61 No document survives that
clarify why she returned, but the year 1929 was the time when the financial
markets collapsed in America and Europe, triggering the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Whatever her motivation to return may have been, she managed
to escape from the ensuing collapse of the art markets in the West. Back in
Japan, her new etchings found a coterie of willing buyers and those dealing
with Korean subjects were the most popular: “Lately, Miss Keith has gone in
for a new medium—colour etchings—and has achieved a new triumph ......
‘Court Musicians’ is already exhausted.”62 The sold out colour etching, Court
Musicians (Fig. 5), is a Korean subject that shows two musicians in official
Chosoˇn dynasty court dress playing traditional instruments. Again, it was an

17 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
outdated subject because Chosoˇn dynasty did not exist when Keith produced
the image. It is precisely this kind of bygone and serene past of Korea,
however, that seems to have appealed most to the Japanese public.
From Japan she made excursions to other East Asian countries including
Korea as she had used to. Due to the lack of documentary evidence,
however, we know very little about what she thought in the Far East in the
1930s until February 1936 when she wrote to Warner after a long lapse,
“how many years is it since I heard from you I wonder? I am writing from
Kyoto.”63 Keith was writing to arrange a series of travelling exhibitions of her
oriental prints in major US cities next year. They eventually turned out to be
successful, and Keith was enthralled, “I am so grateful the world likes my
work, life seems worthwhile. I only wish everybody who works as I do got
the same reward.”64 After the lucrative exhibitions in USA, Keith headed not
for Japan but for England, arriving at Liverpool in June 1937.65 This return
home turned out to be final, and she was never to come back to the Far East
despite her constant wish “to go to the Orient!” again.66
Among the letters Keith wrote to Warner after returning to England exists
an intriguing one which insinuates a deplorable state of collecting Korean art:
Fig. 5 Elizabeth Keith,
Court
Musicians, Korea
1933, from
Elizabeth Keith:
The Printed Works
, Pasadena,
1991, Fig. 68, colour etching,
27.3×40.6cm, p. 48 (artwork
in the public domain;
photograph all rights reserved)

18
I have also been going over my Korean treasures, & I find some fine pictures.
I see nothing like them now in Korea. I had a letter from one of the “Fathers”
of the English Church mission, who is a collector in a small way, & he says it
is impossible to get anything of interest now. I think the Japanese have secured
everything available ...... The sad part of it is, I don’t believe the Koreans are
keeping any of these for future generations.67
It is obvious from the letter that Western visitors to Korea such as Keith
herself and even an Anglican missionary residing in Korea were collecting
Korean art but most valuable items had already passed onto the hands of
Japanese collectors while Koreans were not concerned with safeguarding their
own artefacts systematically.68 Keith’s comments turn out to be largely true:
a number of Westerners living and visiting Korea were engaged in collecting
Korean art in varying degrees but the biggest beneficiaries or plunderers were
Japanese; few Koreans were interested in, to say nothing of being devoted to,
preserving Korean things for themselves.69
The reason for Keith’s departure from Japan to England this time is
palpable: Japanese domestic politics became extremely violent and militarism
was rampant. A peace-loving Christian Scientist, Keith was highly critical of
the rapid rise of militarism worldwide.70 Referring to the Sino-Japanese War in
1937, Keith wrote to Warner:
We are all broken hearted about the unnecessary and cruel war. It is less a
war than a massacre, and one of the most pro-Japanese friends that I have,
who came to see me today, was ashamed of the behaviour of the Japanese. I
maintain, however, that the Japanese people are not in any way responsible.
It is only the military group that so dishonestly hid the truth from their own
people and are led away by the lust for power. But they are no worse than
Italy or Germany!71
The ominous clouds of impending World War II doomed not just East
Asia but also Europe and America, which had an immediate impact on the

19 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
art market. Keith’s letters to Warner in the late 1930s were full of her worries
and complaints about the sudden decline of demands for her prints and of her
desire to explore new markets: “people are not buying pictures ... Everybody
says I must go to S. Africa”; “There is nothing selling in U.S.A ... There is not
a market for my work”; “there is nobody to buy & nowhere to show them
[prints]. England is too small. I have to be a wanderer”; “I am selling no prints
anywhere! I think I shall have to go to S. Africa & see if I can find a market
there.”72
In the midst of the gathering gloom, however, Keith did not yield to
despair but resumed work in 1938, and it was with Korean subjects: “I have
at last begun to work ... I am beginning with Korea-the country I love so
well”; “all my subjects so far are Korean of my new etchings.”73 Although
these new etchings of Korean subjects were finally included in her book Old
Korea, published in 1946, it is uncertain if Keith was already thinking of the
book project in 1938. By the end of 1943, however, she was determined to
do something significant about her Korean subjects: “I have been unearthing
piles of sketches I did in Korea, every aspect of Korean life is there. If my
sister’s play (or film) does not come off, I must use them in some form.”74 It
is apparent from this passage that her sister Elspet was planning to produce
a play or film on Korea and Elizabeth was somehow involved in it. For
unknown reasons the scheme did not materialise, but it bore fruit in the form
of the illustrated book Old Korea. It is a result of close collaboration between
the two sisters, the text written by Elspet and the illustrations drawn by
Elizabeth. As the book title indicates, all of Keith’s illustrations depict traditional
aspects of Korea and no facets of Korea in its modernity are pictured. It is also
a product of clever business acumen because it came out just one year after
the defeat of Japan and the independence of Korea as a result. Moreover, it
was dedicated not to the people of Korea but to the Western Allies of World
War II, “General Douglas MacArthur, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and Admiral
Chester Nimitz, and to all men under their command who were the means of
freeing Korea from her oppressor.”75 This shrewd line of dedication clearly
indicates that Keith was concerned less with celebrating Korean independence

20
than with appealing to Western readerships. Expectedly, she was keen on the
book’s sales, as demonstrated in her letter to Mabel Garner, Warner’s personal
secretary: “I wonder if you have seen my book ‘Old Korea’ ... It has not been
properly handled in the U.S.A ... so few friends have been able to get a hold
of it!”76
V. Concluding Remarks
There is no reason to suspect the sincerity of Keith’s comment quoted
earlier that Korea is the country she “loved so well.” It remains obscure,
however, why she favoured Korea over other East Asian countries. Neither
her published accounts nor her unpublished correspondence with Warner
discloses sufficient information on her professed affection for Korea. In
addition, her attachment to the ‘Land of Morning Calm’ was not strong
enough to induce her to settle in the country while over 200 fellow Britons
made it their home during the 1920s and 1930s.77 In the absence of relevant
documents, it is futile to speculate on why she decided to live in Japan instead
of Korea. Perhaps Korea was just lovely enough to provide visual material
for her as Japan was convenient enough to reside and launch a new career
that she did not dream of in Britain. In essence, print, especially Japanese-
style colour print, is a commercial medium on which Keith depended entirely
for her living. Korea in this context happened to be crucial: visually it was
still less represented than China or Japan; few Western artists had pictured its
nature and culture in quantity before Keith did. Orientalism, of course, was
operating in whatever Keith chose to do as she came undeniably from the
centre of imperialism. There is no doubt that she colluded, if unconsciously,
in orientalising Korea and the Far East. Criticising her simply for being an
implicit imperialist, however, does not do justice to her achievements any
more than lionising her as a selfless lover of Korea does. The decision to
settle in Japan and to become a printmaker specialising in Far Eastern subjects
was ingenious for a British surplus woman to make. As an historical actor and

21 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
agent, Keith did what she was willing and able to do within the boundary
of real-life options available to her. The tides of history, nevertheless, do not
always flow as one wishes. Old Korea seems to have sparked little interest in
the West, and the heydays of her oriental prints was gone in the wake of anti-
Japanese sentiments during and after World War II. Despondent, Elizabeth
Keith died on 5 April 1956 at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in
London.78
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* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the
National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5A2A01044011). I would like to
extend my sincere gratitude to the following scholars and librarians for their generous help
in securing Japanese newspaper materials: Boram Lim at Ewha Womans University Library;
Setsuko Noguchi at Princeton University Library; Hyesook Yang at SOAS, University of
London. Professor Namwon Jang in my department has kindly scanned a rare book in her
possession and posted it to me. Professor Chin-Sung Chang at Seoul National University has
also posted me a recent catalogue containing discussions of Keith’s work. I am deeply grateful
for their liberal collegiality. Finally, I am immensely indebted to my wife, Ute Schulten, for her
assistance in transcribing Keith’s often illegible handwriting.
1 M. C. Salaman, Masters of the Colour Print: Elizabeth Keith (London: Studio Magazine, 1933), ii.
2 Richard Miles, Elizabeth Keith: The Printed Works (Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1991), 9.
3 The current state of research on Keith is dismal. Although sporadic mention has been made of
her and her work in various studies on Western printmakers specialising in East Asian subjects,
there is no serious academic article in English concerned solely with Keith, except for Tomoe
Kumojima, “The Democracy of Art: Elizabeth Keith and the Aesthetic of the Eastern Ordinary,”
in Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings, ed. S. P. Gabriel and N. O. Pagan
(Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 57-75. Despite her long residency in Japan, no proper
research on her in Japanese has been published either. Interestingly, she has gained more
posthumous reputation in Korea than in any other country. A major retrospective exhibition
of Keith’s prints was held at the National Museum of Modern Art in the winter of 2006-7 and
both of Keith’s two books have been translated into Korean.
4 For her birthday, see “Keith, Elizabeth,” Benezit Dictionary of Artists, accessed on 15 December
2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00097753 and www.artbiogs.
co.uk/1/artists/keith-elizabeth. As both of these references do not specify their sources,
Keith’s exact birthday will remain unresolved until someone has checked her parish registers
in Scotland. All the existing literature on Keith presents her birth year as 1887, possibly on
accounts of the Benezit Dictionary, but a leading commercial British genealogical website,
“findmypast”, dates it to 1888. This website does not give a precise source for the year either.
5 There are several Korean articles devoted to her work. Most of these studies in Korean,
however, rely heavily on unsubstantiated sources and on the two books that she has
published. As a result, blatantly wrong information abounds in Korean literature on Keith.
For instance, she is said to have been a court artist, but this claim is a classic case of sloppy

23 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
scholarship. Although the British queen visited Keith’s exhibition of colour prints in 1937, it
does not mean that Keith was appointed a court painter.
6 Elizabeth Keith. Eastern Windows: An Artist’s Notes of Travel in Japan, Hokkaido, Korea, China
and the Philippines (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928); and Elizabeth Keith, Old
Korea: Land of Morning Calm (London: Hutchison, 1946).
7 Reproductions of her prints are now easily available on the internet. In addition, all of Keith’s
known prints and watercolours are reproduced at the end of Youngdahl Song’s Korean
translation of her book Eastern Windows.
8 “Miss Elizabeth Keith: Woman Artist in the Orient,” The Times, April 13, 1956, 13.
9 Arthur Keith, An Autobiography (London: Watts & Co, 1950), 649-650. Arthur Keith (1866-
1955) is a second cousin of Elizabeth and was a prominent anthropologist. One may well
think that he inspired Elizabeth’s interest in East Asia. It is unlikely, however, because he was
a paleoanthropologist concerned with human evolution, not a cultural or social anthropologist
specialising in other cultures.
10 Gertrude Warner is a rich American collector of East Asian art and she was a major patron of
Keith. For more details about Warner, see David Robertson, ed., Precious Cargo: The Legacy of
Gertrude Bass Warner (Portland: University of Oregon Museum of Art, 1997). Keith and Warner
corresponded for more than twenty years and the letters they have exchanged remain in
series II, box 5, folder 4, Gertrude Bass Warner Papers (hereafter GBWP), Special Collections
& University Archives, University of Oregon, USA. All the letters between Keith and Warner
quoted hereafter come from this manuscript collection unless otherwise stated.
11 John Cripps, “Scott, John William Robertson (1866-1962),” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35787.
12 The Probate of Elizabeth Petrie Keith of Idbury Manor, Kingham, Oxfordshire, (Richmond:
National Archives, 1956). From her will, it is evident that Keith was living with Elspet and her
husband at their house, Idbury Manor.
13 “Miss Elizabeth Keith: Woman Artist in the Orient,” The Times, April 13, 1956, 13.
14 In Keith’s will both Elizabeth and Jessie were addressed as “Miss.”
15 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First
World War (London: Penguin, 2007), xi.
16 “Miss Elizabeth Keith: Woman Artist in the Orient,” The Times, April 13, 1956, 13.
17 “Eastern Art Revived by a British Artist,” Illustrated London News, November 21, 1925, 1024.
18 “Miss Elizabeth Keith Will Hold Color Print Exhibit,” The Japan Times, November 4, 1934, 5.

24
19 Cripps, “Scott,” 4; and George Brochner, “Miss Elizabeth Keith’s Colour Prints,” The Studio 90
(1925), 146.
20 “I find it difficult to adjust myself after an 8 years’ absence.” Letter of 5 June, 1927 from
Elizabeth Keith to Warner, in Gertrude Bass Warner Papers, Series II, Box 5, Folder 4: Special
Collections & Archives.
21 Through her brother-in-law Scott, Keith established close connections with powerful members
of Japanese nobilities and authorities. For more details, see Kumojima, “The Democracy of
Art,” 61-62.
22 Dorothy Britton, “Elizabeth Keith (1887-1956): A Marriage of British Art and Japanese
Craftsmanship,” in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits 6, ed. Hugh Cortazzi (Folkestone:
Brill, 2007), 284.
23 Elizabeth Keith, “An Artist’s Impressions of Korea,” Korea Survey 3 (1954), 3.
24 Keith, Old Korea, 7.
25 Keith, Eastern Windows, 15. It is difficult now to establish exactly how many times Keith visited
Korea. Her last sojourn to Korea was in late 1936, and she left Japan in December of the same
year to return to England by way of USA where she was to give exhibitions in a number of
cities. For more details, see “Miss Elizabeth Keith Exhibits New Prints of the Noh and Korea,”
The Japan Times, December 7, 1936, 4. Although it is also uncertain how long she stayed in
Korea on each visit, she seems on average to have stayed for a few months. Elizabeth and her
sister Jessie, for instance, were reported in 1934 to have spent “several months in Korea.” See
The Manchuria Daily News, January 12, 1934, 2.
26 The Japan Times, July 18, 1919, 4.
27 Keith, Eastern Windows, 11.
28 “Art Exhibition is Worth Attending,” The Japan Times, May 26, 1920, 8.
29 “Scenes of Many Lands in Local Art Exhibit,” Japan Advertiser, May 26, 1920, 5.
‘South Gate’ is likely to be a mistake of ‘East Gate’ because there is no watercolour or print by
Keith known now as ‘Seoul: South Gate.’ It is, of course, possible that Keith depicted Seoul’s
South Gate on her first visit to Korea in 1919. If so, it is untraceable.
30 “Women’s Club Hears Talk on Kyoto Meet,” The Japan Times, December 11, 1929, 3.
31 The Japan Advertiser, for example, a major English newspaper in Japan, carried headline news
on the movement already on 5 March. It is feasible that the event deeply affected Elizabeth and
Elspet. In fact, Old Korea, published in 1946, for which Elizabeth provided illustrations and
Elspet wrote most of the contents, is full of stories about the movement.

25 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
32 Keith herself acknowledged the rapid modernisation of Korea. “The old-world atmosphere I
felt was disappearing as I worked. On a later trip I found sad changes.” See Keith, “An Artist’s
Impressions of Korea,” 3.
33 The National Museum of Modern Art, Catalogue of Collections: Prints (Tokyo: National Museum
of Modern Art, 1993), 280-281.
34 Miles, Elizabeth Keith, 6-26.
35 Watanabe recalled in 1956 that he had first met Keith in 1920. For more details, see “Club to
Display Print by British Artist Keith,” The Japan Times, February 10, 1956, 4.
36 Kendall Brown, “Impressions of Japan: Print Interactions East and West,” in Color Woodcut
International: Japan, Britain, and America in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Christine Javid
(Madison: Chazen Museum of Art, 2006), 13-29.
37 “Korean Colour Prints Exhibition,” The Japan Times, June 6, 1921, 8.
38 “Club to Display Print by British Artist Keith,” The Japan Times, February 10, 1956, 4.
39 Sherwood Hall, With Stethoscope in Asia: Korea (McLean: MCL Associates, 1978), 575. Hall was
the founder of the Christmas seal in Korea, and he issued Christmas seals from 1932 to 1940.
Keith designed Hall’s Korean Christmas seals for the years 1934, 1936, 1940. The Japanese
military in Korea demanded changing the 1940 design because it contained a depiction of
mountains higher than twenty metres. The Japanese army regulation at the time stipulated that
nothing higher than twenty metres in the Japanese empire should be represented for military
defence purposes. See Hall, With Stethoscope in Asia, 574. All of Keith’s Korean seal designs
including the unaltered 1940 original are reproduced in Stephen Hasegawa, Dr. Sherwood Hall’s
Christmas and New Year Seals of Korea 1932-1940 (Tokyo: privately published, 2006).
40 The Japan Weekly Chronicle, June 22, 1922, 882.
41 Keith, “An Artist’s Impressions of Korea,” 4.
42 “yo˘nggukyo˘ ryuu˘ i chajak’wa cho˘llamhoe (영국여류의 자작화 전람회),” Dongailbo (동아일보),
September 18, 1921, 3.
43 Keith, Eastern Windows, 37-38.
44 “Miss Elizabeth Keith Exhibits New Prints of the Noh and Korea,” The Japan Times, December 7,
1936, 4.
45 Ibid., 4.
46 “yo˘ ng yo˘ ryuhwagau˘ i sonu˘ro chaehyo˘ ndoenu˘ n choso˘nu˘ i hyangt’osek (영 여류화가의 손으로 재
현되는 조선의 향토색),” Choso˘ nilbo (조선일보), February 2, 1934, 2.
47 It is evident from reports in such contemporary English newspapers published in Japan and

26
China as The Japan Times, The Japan Chronicle, and The North China Herald that Keith’s print
exhibitions were regularly held in Tokyo, Kobe, and Shanghai.
48 Keith, Eastern Windows, 17.
49 Ibid., 21.
50 Soyoung Lee, ed. Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 87; and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Imprinting the Empire:
Western Artists and the Persistence of Colonialism in East Asia,” in The Trans-Pacific
Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society, ed. Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo
(Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2012), 86.
51 Travelogues by Western visitors to Korea at the turn of the twentieth century are too numerous
to be listed here. For a compact anthology, see Martin Uden, Times Past in Kor ea: An
Illustrated Collection of Encounters, Events, Customs and Daily Life Recorded by Foreign Visitors
(London: Routledge, 2003).
52 Kendall Brown, “Visions of the Orient: Western Women Artists in Asia 1900-1940,” Women in
the Arts (2011): 22-25; Lisa Claypool, “Feminine Orientalism or Modern Enchantment? Peiping
and the Graphic Artists Elizabeth Keith and Bertha Lum, 1920s-1930s,” Nan Nu 16 (2014):
91-127; and Joan Jensen, “Women on the Pacific Rim: Some Thoughts on Border Crossings,”
Pacific Historical Review 67 (1998): 3-38.
53 Kendall Brown, Between Two Worlds: The Life and Art of Lillian May Miller (Pasadena: Asia
Pacific Museum, 1998).
54 Kendall Brown, “Lillian Miller: An American Artist in Japan,” Impressions: The Journal of the
Ukiyo-e Society of America 27 (2005-6): 80-97.
55 “Eastern Art Revived by a British Artist,” Illustrated London News, November 21, 1925, 1024.
56 Letter, Keith to Warner, June 5, 1927. Keith was in the Philippines when the Great Kanto
Earthquake actually took place, therefore did not experience the disaster firsthand.
57 Letter, Keith to Warner, June 5, 1927.
58 Letter, Keith to Warner, June 5, 1927.
59 Letter, Keith to Warner, March 13, 1938.
60 Letter, Keith to Warner, April 7, 1937.
61 The Japan Weekly Chronicle, May 9, 1929, 521.
62 The Japan Weekly Chronicle, June 22, 1933, 869.
63 Letter, Keith to Warner, February 6, 1936.
64 Letter, Keith to Warner, April 10, 1937.

27 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
65 Letter, Keith to Warner, June 26, 1937.
66 Letter, Keith to Warner, October 31, 1937.
67 Letter, Keith to Warner, July 28, 1937.
68 It is impossible now to trace Keith’s collection of Korean art. She definitely sold some Korean
folkloric paintings to Warner, as is evident from her letter of 5 August 1938 in GWBP.
69 Liz Wilkinson, “Collecting Korean Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1888-1938,” Journal
of the History of Collections 15 (2003): 241-256.
70 Although it is difficult to establish when and how Keith became an adherent of Christian
Science, a form of Protestantism developed in the USA in the nineteenth century, her
correspondence with Warner, another Christian Scientist, contains several references to their
common denomination. Christianity also played a practical role in Keith’s explorations of
East Asia. Whenever she visited Korea, for instance, she relied heavily on Protestant Western
missionaries such as James Scarth Gale for virtually everything including the procurement of
Korean models for her work.
71 Letter, Keith to Warner, September 8, 1937.
72 Letter, Keith to Warner, October 31, 1937; Letter, Keith to Warner, September 16, 1938;
Letter, Keith to Warner, December 14, 1938; and Letter, Keith to Warner, April 2, 1939. Keith,
however, did not go to South Africa.
73 Letter, Keith to Warner, April 19, 1938, September 16, 1938.
74 Letter, Keith to Warner, December 27, 1943.
75 Keith, Old Korea, 4.
76 Letter, Keith to Warner, January 8, 1948.
77 James Hoare, “The British Community in Korea: The Colonial Period 1910-1942,” Papers of the
British Association for Korean Studies 7 (2000): 76.
78 Probate of Elizabeth Petrie Keith, 1956, National Archives, UK. According to Peter Keith,
Elizabeth’s nephew, Elizabeth died of diabetes. Remaining faithful to the Christian Science
doctrine, she refused to take medication until it was too late. For Peter Keith’s testimony,
visit the website “Visions of the Orient Artist Spotlight: Elizabeth Keith,” National Museum
of Women in the Arts, accessed on 5 November 2019, https://blog.nmwa.org/2011/11/22/
visions-of-the-orient-artist-spotlight-elizabeth-keith/.

28
Archival Sources
Gertrude Bass Warner Papers. UA 022. University of Oregon: Special Collections & Archives.
The Probate of Elizabeth Petrie Keith of Idbury Manor, Kingham, Oxfordshire. Richmond: National
Archives, 1956.
Primary Printed Sources
“Art Exhibition is Worth Attending.” The Japan Times, May 26, 1920.
Brochner, George. “Miss Elizabeth Keith’s Colour Prints.” The Studio 90 (1925): 146.
“Club to Display Print by British Artist Keith.” The Japan Times, February 10, 1956.
“Colour Prints: Miss Keith in Kobe.” The Japan Weekly Chronicle, June 12, 1924.
“Eastern Art Revived by a British Artist.” Illustrated London News, November 21, 1925.
“Elizabeth Keith Returns to City from Soochow.” The China Press, May 22, 1930.
Hall, Sherwood. With Stethoscope in Asia: Korea. McLean: MCL Associates, 1978.
Keith, Arthur. An Autobiography. London: Watts & Co., 1950.
Keith, Elizabeth. “An Artist’s Impressions of Korea,” Korea Survey 3 (1954): 3-4.
Keith, Elizabeth. Eastern Windows: An Artist’s Notes of Travel in Japan, Hokkaido, Korea, China and
the Philippines. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.
Keith, Elizabeth. Old Korea: The Land of Morning Calm. London: Hutchison, 1946.
“Korean Colour Prints Exhibition.” The Japan Times, June 6, 1921.
“Miss Elizabeth Keith Exhibits New Prints of the Noh and Korea.” The Japan Times, December 7,
1936.
“Miss Elizabeth Keith Will Hold Color Print Exhibit,” The Japan Times, November 4, 1934.
“Miss Elizabeth Keith: Woman Artist in the Orient.” The Times, April 13, 1956.
“Scenes of Many Lands in Local Art Exhibit.” Japan Advertiser, May 26, 1920.
Salaman, M. C. Masters of the Colour Print: Elizabeth Keith. London: Studio Magazine, 1933.
The Japan Times, July 18, 1919.
The Japan Times, January 12, 1925.
The Japan Times, April 21, 1940.
The Japan Weekly Chronicle, December 6, 1917.
The Japan Weekly Chronicle, June 22, 1922.
The Japan Weekly Chronicle, June 22, 1933.
The Japan Weekly Chronicle, May 9, 1929.
The Manchuria Daily News, January 12, 1934.

29 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
“Women’s Club Hears Talk on Kyoto Meet.” The Japan Times, December 11, 1929.
“yo˘ nggukyo˘ ryuu˘ i chajak’wa cho˘ llamhoe (영국여류의 자작화 전람회).” Dongailbo (동아일보),
September 18, 1921.
“yo˘ ng yo˘ryuhwagau˘ i sonu˘ ro chaehyo˘ ndoenu˘n choso˘ nu˘i hyangt’osek (영 여류화가의 손으로 재현되는
조선의 향토색).” Choso˘nilbo (조선일보), February 2, 1934.
Secondary Sources
Benezit Dictionary of Artists, s.v. “Keith, Elizabeth,” accessed December 15, 2019. https://doi.
org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00097753 and www.artbiogs.co.uk/1/artists/keith-
elizabeth.
Britton, Dorothy. “Elizabeth Keith (1887-1956): A Marriage of British Art and Japanese
Craftsmanship.” In Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits 6, edited by Hugh Cortazzi, 305-
310. Folkestone: Brill, 2007.
Brown, Kendall. Between Two Worlds: The Life and Art of Lillian May Miller. Pasadena: Asia Pacific
Museum, 1998.
________. “ Lillian Miller: An American Artist in Japan.” Impressions: The Journal of the Ukiyo-e Society of
America 27 (2005-6): 80-97.
________. “Impressions of Japan: Print Interactions East and West.” In Color Woodcut International:
Japan, Britain, and America in the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Christine Javid, 13-29.
Madison: Chazen Museum of Art, 2006.
________. “Visions of the Orient: Western Women Artists in Asia 1900-1940.” Women in the Arts (2011):
22-25.
Claypool, Lisa. “Feminine Orientalism or Modern Enchantment? Peiping and the Graphic Artists
Elizabeth Keith and Bertha Lum, 1920s-1930s.” Nan Nu 16 (2014): 91-127.
Cripps, John. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Scott, John William Robertson (1866-
1962).” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35787.
Hasegawa, Stephen. Dr. Sherwood Hall’s Christmas and New Year Seals of Korea 1932-1940. Tokyo:
privately published, 2006.
Hoare, James. “The British Community in Korea: The Colonial Period 1910-1942.” Papers of the
British Association for Korean Studies 7 (2000): 25-94.
Jensen, Joan. “Women on the Pacific Rim: Some Thoughts on Border Crossings.” Pacific Historical
Review 67 (1998), 3-38.
Kumojima, Tomoe. “The Democracy of Art: Elizabeth Keith and the Aesthetic of the Eastern

30
ordinary.” In Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings, edited by S. P. Gabriel and N.
O. Pagan, 57-75. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Lee, Soyoung. Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2018.
Miles, Richard. Elizabeth Keith: The Printed Works. Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1991.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. “Imprinting the Empire: Western Artists and the Persistence of Colonialism in
East Asia.” In The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society, edited
by Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo , 75-97. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company,
2012.
Nicholson, Virginia. Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World
War. London: Penguin, 2007.
Robertson, David. Pr ecious Cargo: The Legacy of Gertrude Bass Warner. Portland: University of
Oregon Museum of Art, 1997.
The National Museum of Modern Art. Catalogue of Collections: Prints. Tokyo: National Museum of
Modern Art, 1993.
Uden, Martin. Times Past in Korea: An Illustrated Collection of Encounters, Events, Customs and Daily
Life Recorded by Foreign Visitors. London: Routledge, 2003.
“Visions of the Orient Artist Spotlight: Elizabeth Keith.” National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Accessed November 5, 2019. https://blog.nmwa.org/2011/11/22/visions-of-the-orient-artist-
spotlight-elizabeth-keith/.
Wilkinson, Liz. “Collecting Korean Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1888-1938.” Journal of the
History of Collections 15 (2003): 241-256.

31 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
Chun, Dongho Elizabeth Keith (1887/8-1956) was a British artist whose colour prints depicting
Far Eastern subjects have once gripped the visual imagination of art lovers. At
her prime in the 1930s, she was even ranked in the same league as Hiroshige
and Hokusai, the eminent old masters of Japanese Ukiyo-e (浮世絵). Based
largely on newly discovered contemporary sources such as newspapers
and hitherto unpublished correspondence, this article has two overlapping
aims. First, it seeks to provide a contextual account of Keith’s life in broadly
chronological order. Second, it attempts to highlight her relations with Korea:
not only was her career as a popular printmaker made possible thanks to her
early depiction of Korean subjects but later in life she devoted her energy
to producing an illustrated book on Korea. Keith, of course, happened to
live in the age of imperialism, and there is no doubt that she colluded, if
unconsciously, in orientalising Korea and the Far East. Criticising her simply for
being an implicit imperialist, however, does not do justice to her achievements
any more than lionising her as a selfless lover of Korea does. After all, the
decision to settle in East Asia and to become a printmaker specialising in Far
Eastern subjects was ingenious for a British ‘surplus woman’ to make. As
an historical actor and agent, Keith did what she was willing and able to do
within the boundary of real life options available to her. This article purports to
locate Keith and her art within the context of the interplays between historical
contingencies and human desires, and it calls in particular for more solid
documentary research than most current studies available on Keith.
Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea

32
Keywords: Elizabeth Keith, Tourist Print, Shin-hanga (新版画), Surplus Women, Female Artist, Korea

33 Selling East Asia in Colour: Elizabeth Keith and Korea
전동호
동아시아 판매하기: 엘리자베스 키스와 조선
엘리자베스 키스 (Elizabeth Petrie Keith, 1887/8-1956)는 영국의 여성 미술가로
20세기 전반 조선과 일본, 중국 등 동아시아를 소재로 한 판화를 다수 제작한 작
가이다. 그는 일본에 정착하여 동아시아 여러 지역을 널리 여행하였고 이 과정에
서 그린 스케치를 바탕으로 제작된 판화는 동아시아뿐만 아니라 유럽 및 미국에
서 상당한 인기를 얻었다. 1915년 일본에서 처음 시작된 ‘신한가(新版画)’ 운동의
중심 인물 중 한 사람으로 평가되기도 하는 키스와 그의 작품은 흥미롭게도 키스
사후(死後) 일본이나 영국보다 한국에서 더 높은 관심을 받았고 이에 대한 연구도
한국에서 가장 활발히 이루어져 왔다. 그러나 기존 국내 연구는 당대 신문이나 잡
지, 그리고 키스가 후원자들과 주고 받은 편지 등 새로운 1차 사료 발굴을 등한시
하였다. 본고는 이러한 국내 키스 관련 연구의 문제점을 극복하기 위해 필자가 새
롭게 발굴한 1차 사료를 바탕으로 키스의 생애, 그 중에서도 특히 그의 조선 관련
활동을 재구성하려는 시도이다. 그간 학계에 부정확하게 알려지거나 전혀 알려지
지 않은 키스의 생애와 관련된 새로운 정보를 제시하고 향후 좀 더 정확한 사실에
입각한 키스 연구의 초석을 다지려는 것이 본고의 주요 목표이다. 따라서 본고는
키스가 제작한 특정 이미지에 대한 집중적 분석이나 이론적 논의를 포함하지 않
음을 미리 밝혀 둔다.
주제어: 엘리자베스 키스, 관광객용 판화, 신한가(新版画), 잉여 여성, 여성 미술가, 조선