This catalogue, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition held at the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, presents the role played by prints in creating and disseminating the image of Spain from the early 1600s to the mid-1900s.

Taking as a basis nearly 250 works housed exclusively in Japanese collections, a group of international specialists headed by Kawase Yusuke (curator of the exhibition together with Inaba Yuta and editor of the catalogue) addresses various issues in two main areas. They begin by studying how prints made it possible to establish a dialogue with tradition through Don Quixote and Velázquez and how works on Spanish themes executed chiefly by French and British artists spread the image – far removed from reality – of an exotic and Orientalising country populated by bandits, gypsies, majos and manolas in the nineteenth century. Following an in-depth examination of Goya and the influence of his series, they analyse Catalan Noucentisme and the output of key figures like Fortuny, going on to survey the history of Spanish printmaking during the first half of the 1900s and its reception in Japan with artists as important as Picasso, Casas, Miró, Dalí and Tàpies.

Kawase Yusuke is curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. He studied Art History at Tokyo University of Arts and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Before joining his current institution, he received the Theodore Rousseau Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as associate curator at the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum. His main field of research is seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian art. He has organised various exhibitions, including Caravaggio and his Time: Friends, Rivals and Enemies (2016).