Japonisme

thumb|Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects by the painter [[James Tissot in 1869 is a representation of the popular curiosity about all Japanese items that started with the opening of the country in the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s.]]

Japonisme is a French term that refers to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design among a number of Western European artists in the nineteenth century following the forced reopening of foreign trade with Japan in 1858. Japonisme was first described by French art critic and collector Philippe Burty in 1872.

While the effects of the trend were likely most pronounced in the visual arts, they extended to architecture, landscaping and gardening, and clothing. Even the performing arts were affected; Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is perhaps the best example.

thumb|upright|Window of La Pagode (Paris), built in 1896

From the 1860s, ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many Western artists. These prints were created for the commercial market in Japan.

Japanese decorative arts, including ceramics, enamels, metalwork, and lacquerware, were as influential in the West as the graphic arts. During the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese pottery was exported around the world. From a long history of making weapons for samurai, Japanese metalworkers had achieved an expressive range of colours by combining and finishing metal alloys. Japanese cloisonné enamel reached its "golden age" from 1890 to 1910, producing items more advanced than ever before. These items were widely visible in nineteenth-century Europe: a succession of world's fairs displayed Japanese decorative art to millions, and it was picked up by galleries and fashionable stores. Writings by critics, collectors, and artists expressed considerable excitement about this "new" art. Collectors including Siegfried Bing and Christopher Dresser displayed and wrote about these works. Thus Japanese styles and themes reappeared in the work of Western artists and craftsmen.

History

Seclusion (1639–1858)

thumb|Commode (commode à vantaux) in the [[Louis XVI style, made in France, using Japanese lacquer panels, 1790, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City]]

During most of the Edo period (1603–1867), Japan was in a time of seclusion and only one international port remained active. Tokugawa Iemitsu ordered that an island, Dejima, be built off the shores of Nagasaki from which Japan could receive imports. Every year the Dutch arrived in Japan with fleets of ships filled with Western goods for trade. The cargo included many Dutch treatises on painting and a number of Dutch prints.

During the era of seclusion, Japanese goods remained a luxury sought after by European elites. The production of Japanese porcelain increased in the seventeenth century, after Korean potters were brought to the Kyushu area. The immigrants, their descendants, and Japanese counterparts unearthed kaolin clay mines and began to make high quality pottery. The blend of traditions evolved into a distinct Japanese industry with styles such as Imari ware and Kakiemon. They would later influence European and Chinese potters. An extravagant way to display porcelain in a home was to create a porcelain room with shelves placed throughout to show off the exotic wares, The European imitation of Asian lacquerwork is referred to as Japanning.

Re-opening (19th century)

During the Kaei era (1848–1854), after more than 200 years of seclusion, foreign merchant ships of various nationalities began to visit Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography and printing techniques. With this new opening in trade, Japanese art and artifacts began to appear in small curiosity shops in Paris and London. Japonisme began as a craze for collecting Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e. Some of the first samples of ukiyo-e were seen in Paris.

During this time, European artists were seeking alternatives to the strict European academic methodologies. Around 1856, the French artist Félix Bracquemond encountered a copy of the sketch book Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre. In the years following this discovery, there was an increase of interest in Japanese prints. They were sold in curiosity shops, tea warehouses, and larger shops. It and other shops organized gatherings which facilitated the spread of information regarding Japanese art and techniques.

Vincent van Gogh

thumb|upright|left|[[Portrait of Père Tanguy by Vincent van Gogh, an example of Ukiyo-e influence in Western art (1887)]]

Vincent van Gogh's interest in Japanese prints began when he discovered illustrations by Félix Régamey featured in The Illustrated London News and Le Monde illustré. Régamey created woodblock prints, followed Japanese techniques, and often depicted scenes of Japanese life. by identifiable artists like Hiroshige and Kunisada. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and their colorful palettes, Van Gogh incorporated a similar vibrancy into his own works.

Alfred Stevens

thumb|upright|[[La parisienne japonaise by Alfred Stevens (1872)]]

The Belgian painter Alfred Stevens was one of the earliest collectors and enthusiasts of Japanese art in Paris. Objects from Stevens' studio illustrate his fascination with Japanese and exotic knick-knacks and furniture. Stevens was close with Manet and to James McNeill Whistler,

From the mid-1860's, Japonisme became a fundamental element in many of Stevens' paintings. One of his most famous Japonisme-influenced works is La parisienne japonaise (1872). He realized several portraits of young women dressed in kimono, and Japanese elements feature in many other paintings of his, such as the early La Dame en Rose (1866), which combines a view of a fashionably dressed woman in an interior with a detailed examination of Japanese objects, and The Psyché (1871), wherein on a chair there sit Japanese prints, indicating his artistic passion.

Edgar Degas

thumb|upright|[[Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, 1879–1880. Aquatint, drypoint, soft-ground etching, and etching with burnishing, 26.8 × 23.6 cm.]]

In the 1860s, Edgar Degas began to collect Japanese prints from La Porte Chinoise and other small print shops in Paris. His contemporaries had begun to collect prints as well, which gave him a wide array of sources for inspiration. The atypical positioning of his female figures and the dedication to reality in his prints aligned him with Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Sukenobu. Degas also continued to use lines to create depth and separate space within the scene.

James McNeill Whistler

Japanese art was exhibited in Britain beginning in the early 1850s. These exhibitions featured various Japanese objects, including maps, letters, textiles, and objects from everyday life. These exhibitions served as a source of national pride for Britain and served to create a separate Japanese identity apart from the generalized "Orient" cultural identity.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist who worked primarily in Britain. During the late 19th century, Whistler began to reject the Realist style of painting that his contemporaries favored. Instead, he found simplicity and technicality in the Japanese aesthetic. Rather than copying specific artists and artworks, Whistler was influenced by general Japanese methods of articulation and composition, which he integrated into his works.

Japanese gardens

thumb|[[Claude Monet's garden in Giverny with the Japanese footbridge and the water lily pool (1899)]]

The aesthetic of Japanese gardens was introduced to the English-speaking world by Josiah Conder's Landscape Gardening in Japan (Kelly & Walsh, 1893), which sparked the first Japanese gardens in the West. A second edition was published in 1912. Conder's principles have sometimes proved hard to follow:

<nowiki> </nowiki>Tassa (Saburo) Eida created several influential gardens, two for the Japan–British Exhibition in London in 1910 and one built over four years for William Walker, 1st Baron Wavertree. The latter can still be visited at the Irish National Stud.

Samuel Newsom's Japanese Garden Construction (1939) offered Japanese aesthetics as a corrective in the construction of rock gardens, which owed their quite separate origins in the West to the mid-19th century desire to grow alpines in an approximation of Alpine scree. According to the Garden History Society, Japanese landscape gardener Seyemon Kusumoto was involved in the development of around 200 gardens in the UK. In 1937, he exhibited a rock garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, and worked on the Burngreave Estate at Bognor Regis, a Japanese garden at Cottered in Hertfordshire, and courtyards at Du Cane Court in London.

The impressionist painter Claude Monet modelled parts of his garden in Giverny after Japanese elements, such as the bridge over the lily pond, which he painted numerous times. In this series, by detailing just on a few select points such as the bridge or the lilies, he was influenced by traditional Japanese visual methods found in ukiyo-e prints, of which he had a large collection. He also planted a large number of native Japanese species to give it a more exotic feeling.

Museums

In the United States, the fascination with Japanese art extended to collectors and museums creating significant collections which still exist and have influenced many generations of artists. The epicenter was in Boston, likely due to Isabella Stewart Gardner, a pioneering collector of Asian art. As a result, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now claims to house the finest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery house the largest Asian art research library in the United States, where they house Japanese art together with the Japanese-influenced works of Whistler.

Gallery

Explanatory notes

References

Citations

General and cited references

External links

"Japonisme" from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History
"Orientalism, Absence, and Quick~Firing Guns: The Emergence of Japan as a Western Text"
"Japonisme: Exploration and Celebration"
Marc Maison's Gallery specialized in japonisme
The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, fully digitized text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art libraries; contains essay "Degas, Japanese Prints, and Japonisme" (pp. 247–260)