William Anderson (collector)

William Anderson FRCS (18 December 1842 – 27 October 1900) was an English surgeon born in Shoreditch, London.

He was Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy in London, and an important collector and scholar of Japanese art.

In 1873, he moved to Tokyo, Japan, where he was professor of anatomy and surgery at the Imperial Naval Medical College, and gave lectures both in English and in Japanese, which he learned for that purpose.

[4] Between 1882 and 1900, Anderson donated his collection of approximately 2000 Japanese illustrated woodblock-printed books to what is now the British Library.

He was the author of the Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum (1886); and The Pictorial Arts of Japan (1886).