Featured on PDR in the collection Photographs of Japanese Sword Guards (1916)

In the mid-1890s, after health problems forced him to give up landscape painting, Georg Oeder (b. Aachen, Germany, 1846) threw himself into collecting Japanese art and artifacts — above all ukiyo-e prints and sword guards (tsuba). His collection of tsuba, which was one of the most extensive in the world at the time, was photographed and printed in a catalogue published in 1916. This catalogue is now almost all that remains of Oeder’s collection, most of which was auctioned off or lost after his death in 1931.