Oxford Art Online

1. Oxford Art Online
Grove Art OnlineJaponisme
Phylis Floyd.
Bibliography updated 15 July 2008
Article contents
• Japonisme.
o 1. Origins and diffusion.
o 2. Painting and graphic arts.
o 3. Decorative arts.
o 4. Conclusion.
o Bibliography
article url: http://0-
www.oxfordartonline.com.library.sl.nsw.gov.au/subscriber/article/grove/art/T044421
Japonisme.
French term used to describe a range of European borrowings from Japanese art. It was coined in
1872 by the French critic, collector and printmaker Philippe Burty ‘to designate a new field of
study—artistic, historic and ethnographic’, encompassing decorative objects with Japanese designs
(similar to 18th-century Chinoiserie), paintings of scenes set in Japan, and Western paintings, prints
and decorative arts influenced by Japanese aesthetics. Scholars in the 20th century have
distinguished japonaiserie, the depiction of Japanese subjects or objects in a Western style, from
Japonisme, the more profound influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art.
1. Origins and diffusion.
There has been wide debate over who was the first artist in the West to discover Japanese art and
over the date of this discovery. According to Bénédite, Félix Bracquemond first came under the
influence of Japanese art after seeing the first volume of Katsushika Hokusai’s Hokusai manga
(‘Hokusai’s ten thousand sketches’, 1814) at the printshop of Auguste Delâtre in Paris in 1856.
Adams argued that the American artist John La Farge was first: he began acquiring Japanese art in
1856 and had made decorative paintings reflecting its influence by 1859. Other authors conclude
that since Japan began actively to export its wares only about 1859, Western artists could not have
known Japanese art until the early 1860s.
Japanese works, however, were available in Europe before 1854, the year in which the American
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794–1858) opened Japan to trade with the West with the
signing of the Kanagawa Treaty. Dutch merchants, in particular, in Japan were permitted limited
trade through the island of Dejima and collected paintings, illustrated books, prints and objets d’art,
which joined such public collections in Europe as the Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm, the
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the British Museum, London, and the Rijksmuseum voor
Volkenkunde, Leiden.

2. Following Japan’s opening to trade, access to Japanese wares as well as European public interest
increased. Various artefacts were sold at public auctions and in Parisian curiosity shops, such as
L’Empire Chinoise and Mme Desoye’s store on the Rue de Rivoli, also known as la Porte Chinoise.
In London, Farmer & Roger’s Oriental Warehouse (later known as Liberty & Co.) opened in 1862.
These shops sold both Chinese and Japanese art and were gathering-spots for artists, critics and
collectors who found a new fashion in oriental art. In Britain James Abbott McNeill Whistler, D. G.
Rossetti, W. M. Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
Charles Keene, E. W. Godwin, William Morris, William Burges, Rutherford Alcock (1809–97),
John Leighton (1822–1912), R. Norman Shaw and Christopher Dresser purchased Japanese objects
at Farmer & Roger’s in the early 1860s or otherwise recorded their interest in the art and culture of
Japan. In France in the 1860s the writers Charles Baudelaire, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Théophile Gautier, Emile Zola and Jules Husson Champfleury and the artists Jean-François Millet,
Théodore Rousseau, James Tissot, Alfred (Emile-Léopold) Stevens, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas
and Claude Monet began collecting Japanese art. About 1866 Burty, Zacharie Astruc, Henri Fantin-
Latour, Jules Jacquemart, Alphonse Hirsch (1843–84), M. L. Solon and Bracquemond formed the
secret Société du Jing-lar, a club devoted to the study and promotion of Japanese culture.
Major exhibitions also fuelled European enthusiasm for the decorative and pictorial arts of Japan:
the International Exhibition in London (1862), the Musée Oriental (founded 1865) at the Union
Centrale des Beaux-Arts (later the Musée des Arts Décoratifs) and the Exposition Universelle in
Paris in 1867 were the most important early exhibitions. In the 1860s such institutions as the South
Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum) and the British Museum in London, and
the Bibliothèque Nationale and Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, added Japanese art to their
holdings. The Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, bought Japanese works
from the displays at the Exposition Universelle of 1873. In the late 19th century such dealers as
Kanezaburō Wakai, Tadamasa Hayashi (1851–1905) and Siegfried Bing also promoted Japanese
art.
2. Painting and graphic arts.
From the early 1860s Japonisme could be found in nearly all media across a variety of stylistic
movements. In painting and the graphic arts it influenced the asymmetrical compositions of Degas
and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the book illustrations of Walter Crane and the wood-engravings of
Winslow Homer. The flatter modelling of Manet, Whistler, the Impressionists, Vincent van Gogh,
Paul Gauguin and the Nabis had roots in Japanese sources, as did the pure colours and flat outlined
forms preferred by many of these painters. Japanese art also inspired similar decorative qualities in
the work of the Eastern European artists Emil Orlik and Otto Eckmann. The calligraphic line of
oriental ink painting influenced the Impressionist brushstroke, the drawings and prints of Pierre
Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, as well as graphic works by Manet, van Gogh and Toulouse-
Lautrec in France and Aubrey Beardsley in England. For the Pre-Raphaelites, the all-over
patterning, the naive style of outlined forms and the subject of women in Japanese prints was as
interesting as late medieval and early Italian painting. In Italy the Macchiaioli group also studied
and was inspired by the dramatic compositions and strong colours of Japanese prints. Such
American artists as La Farge, Homer, Elihu Vedder, William Merritt Chase, John H. Twachtman
and Maurice Prendergast were influenced by Japanese composition and design and often
incorporated oriental motifs into their works. Later Helen Hyde (b 1868), Will Bradley, Louis John
Rhead and Arthur W. Dow (1857–1922) adopted Japanese styles and effects in their graphic art.
The introduction of Japanese colour woodcuts to the West from the mid-19th century dramatically
affected the history of printmaking. The woodcut revival of Auguste Lepère, Henri Rivière, Félix
Vallotton, Ernst Hermann Walther (b 1858) and Eckmann was inspired by Japanese sources.

3. Similarly, Japanese achievements in colour printing promoted the explosion in colour lithography
and colour etching of the late 19th century.
3. Decorative arts.
Japonisme in the decorative arts at first consisted primarily of imitations of Japanese models, with
stylistic features paralleling Japonisme in painting; features such as asymmetrical compositions,
pure bright colours combined in complementary colour schemes, and bold flat patterns and motifs.
Many of these were copied directly from Japanese craftsmen’s manuals and dyers’ stencils.
Japanese inspiration is evident in the products of the French manufacturers Christofle & Co. and
Haviland & Co. of Limoges, in the designs of Joseph Bouvier (1840–1901), Bracquemond, Jean
Charles Cazin and Camille Moreau (1840–97), and in the cloisonné enamels of Alexis Falize
(1811–98) and his son Lucien Falize.
In the late 19th century the popularity of Japanese design continued; it is particularly evident in
products of the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau, for example in the glasswork of
François-Eugène Rousseau, the ceramic decorations of Joseph-Théodore Deck and Emile Gallé, and
the jewellery of René Lalique. In American and British decorative arts Japonisme appears in works
produced by the Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati, OH, which employed Japanese craftsmen, in the
bold, patterned textile designs of A. H. Mackmurdo and Candace Wheeler, in the designs of the
stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge, in the furniture of Christian Herter and
in the naturalistic motives applied to silver manufactured by Tiffany & Co and Gorham.
4. Conclusion.
Western artists sought inspiration in Japanese art for a variety of reasons. In the applied arts
Japonisme arose from a widespread study of historic decoration, stemming from a desire to improve
the quality of design in manufactured goods. The study of Japanese models also promoted a broader
interest in principles of decorative design; during the late 19th century publications on decoration
and the applied arts grew in number, and Japanese examples were frequently included.
In Britain, the allure of Japanese art coincided with a fascination for the decorative styles, pure
colours and spiritual quality of medieval art and early Italian painting. In France, the critic Astruc,
among others, advocated the model of Japanese originality as an antidote to the belaboured
academic tradition. In the mid-19th century European artists had begun to draw inspiration from
such non-traditional sources as caricatures, popular prints and, in France, brightly coloured Epinal
woodcuts. Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which were often compared to these media, shared with them a
graphic expressiveness, popular subject-matter, naive, archaizing style and original compositions.
It was the Japanese approach to form—expressive line, abstract graphic style, decorative colours
and dramatic asymmetrical compositions—that most influenced Western artists. In 1905 the English
critic C. J. Holmes wrote: ‘Oriental art is almost wholly symbolic … the artist conveys to the
educated spectator a sense of things beyond the mere matter of his picture—something which the
most elaborate and complete representation would fail to convey’ (Holmes, 1905, p. 5). As Holmes
suggested, the study of Japanese art contributed to the birth of formalist aesthetics in the 20th
century.
Bibliography
W. M. Rossetti: ‘Japanese Woodcuts’, The Reader (31 Oct 1863), pp. 501–3 (7 Nov 1863), pp.
537–40

4. E. Chesneau: ‘Beaux-arts, l’art japonais’, Les Nations rivales dans l’art (Paris, 1868), pp. 415–54
P. Burty: ‘Japonisme’, Ren. Litt. & A., i (1872), pp. 25–6, 59–60, 83–4, 106–7, 122–3; ii (1873),
pp. 3–5
P. Burty: ‘Japonisme’, L’Art, ii (1875), pp. 1–7, 330–42; v (1876), pp. 49–58, 278–82; vi (1876),
pp. 150–55
E. Chesneau: ‘Exposition Universelle, le Japon à Paris’, Gaz. B.-A., n.s., xviii (1878), pp. 385–97,
841–56
Le Blanc du Vernet: ‘L’Art japonais’, L’Art, xxi (1880), pp. 132–3, 250–55; xxii (1880), pp. 229–
32; xxix (1882), pp. 249–53
L. Bénédite: ‘Félix Bracquemond, l’animalier’, A. & Déc., xvii (1905), pp. 35–47
C. J. Holmes: ‘The Uses of Japanese Art to Europe’, Burl. Mag., viii (1905), pp. 3–11
R. Graul: Ostasiatische Kunst und ihr Einfluss auf Europa (Leipzig, 1906)
E. Scheyer: ‘Far Eastern Art and French Impressionism’, A.Q., vi (1943), pp. 116–43
C. Lancaster: The Japanese Influence in America (New York, 1963)
The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (exh. cat., ed. C. F. Ives;
New York, Met., 1974)
Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art, 1854–1910 (exh. cat., ed. G. Weisberg; Cleveland,
OH, Mus. A., 1975)
C. Yamada: Dialogue in Art: Japan and the West (Tokyo and New York, 1976)
D. Bromfield: The Art of Japan in later 19th Century Europe: Problems of Art Criticism and
Theory (diss., U. Leeds, 1977)
Japonisme in Art: An International Symposium: Tokyo, 1979
Ukiyo-e Prints and the Impressionist Painters: Meeting of the East and the West (exh. cat., Tokyo,
Sunshine Mus.; Osaka, Mun. Mus. A.; Fukuoka, A. Mus.; 1979)
K. Berger: Japonismus in der westlichen Malerei, 1860–1920 (Munich, 1980)
S. Wichmann: Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (New York, 1981)
Japonismus und Art Nouveau: Europäische Graphik aus den Sammlungen des Museums für Kunst
und Gewerbe Hamburg (exh. cat., Hamburg, Mus. Kst & Gew., 1981)
E. Evett: Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth Century Europe (Ann Arbor, 1982)
D. Johnson: ‘Japanese Prints in Europe before 1840’, Burl. Mag., cxxiv (1982), pp. 341–8

5. P. Floyd: Japonisme in Context: Documentation, Criticism, Aesthetic Reactions (diss., Ann Arbor,
U. MI, 1983)
H. Adams: ‘John La Farge’s Discovery of Japanese Art: A new Perspective on the Origins of
Japonisme’, A. Bull., lxvii (1985), pp. 449–85
P. Floyd: ‘Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese Imagery in Europe in 19th-
century Public Collections’, A. Bull., lxviii (1986), pp. 105–41
Le Japonisme (exh. cat., Paris, Grand Pal.; Tokyo, N. Mus. W.A.; 1988)
P. Floyd: Seeking the Floating World: The Japanese Spirit in Turn-of-the-Century French Art
(Tokyo, 1989)
S. Wichmann: Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858 (New York, 1999)
B. Lemoine: Regards et discours européens sur le Japon et l’Inde au XIXe siècle: Actes du
colloque, 3–4 juin 1998 (Limoges, 2000)
T. Watanabe: ‘Japonisme’, Crafts, clxxiii (Nov–Dec 2001), pp. 42–5
C. W. Laidlaw: ‘Painting with Silken Threads: Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism in Nineteenth-
century Boston’, Stud. Dec. A., x/2 (Spring–Summer 2003), pp. 42–68
G. P. Weisberg: ‘Lost and Found: S. Bing’s Merchandising of Japonisme and Art Nouveau’, 19th
C. A. Worldwide, iv/2 (Summer 2005), p. 2
Phylis Floyd
Copyright © Oxford University Press 2007 — 2010.
Privacy Policy and Legal Notices
Your access is brought to you by:State Library of New South Wales (26292)
Copyright © Oxford University Press 2007 — 2010.