It has been requested that the title of this article be changed to Japonisme . Please see the relevant discussion. The page should not be moved unless the discussion is closed; summarizing the consensus achieved in support of the move. |
Japonism [lower-alpha 1] is a French term that refers to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design in western Europe in the nineteenth century following the forced reopening of trade with Japan in 1853. [1] [2]
Japonisme was first described by French art critic and collector Philippe Burty in 1872. [3]
From the 1860s, ukiyo-e , Japanese woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many Western artists. [4] These prints were created for the commercial market in Japan. [4] Although a percentage of prints were brought to the West through Dutch trade merchants, it was not until the 1860s that ukiyo-e prints gained popularity in Europe. [4] Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color and composition. Ukiyo-e prints featured dramatic foreshortening and asymmetrical compositions. [5]
During the Edo period (1639–1858), Japan was in a period of seclusion and only one international port remained active. [6] Tokugawa Iemitsu ordered that an island, Dejima, be built off the shores of Nagasaki from which Japan could receive imports. [6] The Dutch were the only country able to engage in trade with the Japanese, however, this small amount of contact still allowed for Japanese art to influence the West. [7] Every year the Dutch arrived in Japan with fleets of ships filled with Western goods for trade. [8] In the cargoes arrived many Dutch treatises on painting and a number of Dutch prints. [8] Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818) was one of the notable Japanese artists that studied the Dutch imports. [8] Kōkan created one of the first etchings in Japan which was a technique he had learned from one of the imported treatises. [8] Kōkan would combine the technique of linear perspective, which he learned from a treatise, with his own ukiyo-e styled paintings.
Through the seclusion era, Japanese goods remained a sought after luxury by European monarchs. [9] Japanese porcelain manufacturing began in the seventeenth century after Korean potters settled in Kyusyu area. They unearthed kaolin clay near Nagasaki and began to make high quality pottery. [9] Japanese manufacturers were aware of the popularity of porcelain in Europe, therefore, some products were specifically produced for the Dutch trade. [9] Porcelain and lacquerware became the main exports from Japan to Europe. [10] Porcelain was used to decorate the homes of monarchs in the Baroque and Rococo style. [10] A popular way to display porcelain in a home was to create a porcelain room. Shelves would be placed throughout the room to display the exotic decorations. [10]
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. [11] Japonisme began as a craze for collecting Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e. Some of the first samples of ukiyo-e were to be seen in Paris. [12] In about 1856 the French artist Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of the sketch book Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre. [13] The sketchbook had arrived in Delâtre's workshop shortly after Japanese ports had opened to the global economy in 1854; therefore, Japanese artwork had not yet gained popularity in the West. [14] 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. [13] Shops such as La Porte Chinoise specialized in the sale of Japanese and Chinese imports. [13] La Porte Chinoise, in particular, attracted artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas who drew inspiration from the prints. [15] European artists at this time were seeking an alternative style to the strict academic methodologies. [16] Gatherings organized by shops like La Porte Chinoise facilitated the spread of information regarding Japanese art and techniques. [16]
Ukiyo-e prints were one of the main Japanese influences on Western art. Western artists were inspired by different uses of compositional space, flattening of planes, and abstract approaches to color. An emphasis on diagonals, asymmetry, and negative space can be seen in the Western artists who were influenced by this style. [17]
Vincent van Gogh began his deep interest in Japanese prints when he discovered illustrations by Félix Régamey featured in The Illustrated London News and Le Monde Illustré. [18] Régamey created woodblock prints, followed Japanese techniques, and often depicted scenes of Japanese life. [18] Van Gogh used Régamey as a reliable source for the artistic practices and everyday life scenes of the Japanese. Beginning in 1885, van Gogh switched from collecting magazine illustrations, such as Régamey, to collection ukiyo-e prints that could be bought in small Parisian shops. [18] Van Gogh shared these prints with his contemporaries and organized a Japanese print exhibition in Paris in 1887. [18] Van Gogh's Portrait of Pere Tanguy (1887) is a portrait of his color merchant, Julien Tanguy. Van Gogh created two versions of this portrait, which both feature a backdrop of Japanese prints. [19] Many of the prints behind Tanguy can be identified, with artists such as Hiroshige and Kunisada featured. Van Gogh filled the portrait with vibrant colors. He believed that buyers were no longer interested in grey-toned Dutch paintings, rather paintings with many colors were seen as modern and were sought after. [20] He was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and their colorful palettes. Van Gogh included into his own works the vibrancy of color in the foreground and the background of paintings that he observed in Japanese woodblock prints and made use of light to clarify. [20]
In the 1860s, Edgar Degas began to collect Japanese prints from La Porte Chinoise and other small print shops in Paris. [21] Degas’ contemporaries had begun to collect prints as well which gave him a large collection for inspiration. [21] Among the prints shown to Degas was a copy of Hokusai's Random Sketches which had been purchased by Bracquemond after seeing it in Delâtre's workshop. [16] The estimated date of Degas’ adoption of japonismes into his prints is 1875. [21] The Japanese print style can be seen in Degas’ choice to divide individual scenes by placing barriers vertically, diagonally and horizontally. [21] Similar to many Japanese artists, Degas’ prints focus on women and their daily routines. [22] The atypical positioning of his female figures and the dedication to reality in Degas’ prints aligned him with Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Sukenobu. [22] In Degas' print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery (1879-1880), the commonalities between Japanese prints and Degas' work can be found in the two figures: one that stands and one that sits. [23] The composition of the figures was familiar in Japanese prints. Degas also continues the use of lines to create depth and separate space within the scene. [23] Degas' most clear appropriation is of the woman leaning on a closed umbrella which is borrowed directly from Hokusai's Random Sketches. [24]
Japanese art was exhibited in Britain beginning in the early 1850s. [25] These exhibitions featured a variation of Japanese objects, including maps, letters, textiles and objects from everyday life. [26] 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. [27] 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, Whistler found simplicity and technicality in the Japanese aesthetic. [28] Rather than copying specific Japanese artists and artworks, Whistler was influenced by general Japanese methods of articulation and composition which he integrated into his works. [28]
The aesthetic of Japanese gardens was introduced to the English-speaking world by Josiah Conder's Landscape Gardening in Japan (Kelly & Walsh, 1893). It sparked the first Japanese gardens in the West. A second edition was required in 1912. [29] Conder's principles have sometimes proved hard to follow:
Robbed of its local garb and mannerisms, the Japanese method reveals aesthetic principles applicable to the gardens of any country, teaching, as it does, how to convert into a poem or picture a composition, which, with all its variety of detail, otherwise lacks unity and intent [30]
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; [31] the latter can still be visited at the Irish National Stud. [32]
Samuel Newsom's Japanese Garden Construction (1939) offered Japanese aesthetic 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, the 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 modeled parts of his garden in Giverny after Japanese elements, such as the bridge over the lily pond, which he painted numerous times. 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. [33] [34] [35] He also planted a large number of native Japanese species to give it a more exotic feeling.
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 artist. The epicenter was Boston in no small part due to Isabella Stewart Gardner, a pioneering collector of Asian art. [36] As a consequence, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now houses the finest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. [37] The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery house the largest Asian art research library in the United States and house Japanese art together with the Japanese influenced works of Whistler.
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe. Musée d'Orsay had 3.177 million visitors in 2017.
Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is the fifth largest museum in the United States. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. It is home to 8,161 paintings, second most only to the Metropolitan Museum in New York among American museums. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 52nd most visited art museum in the world as of 2019.
Utagawa Hiroshige, born Andō Hiroshige, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.
The Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection is an art museum in Zürich, Switzerland. It was established by the Bührle family to make Emil Georg Bührle's collection of European sculptures and paintings available to the public. The museum is in a villa adjoining Bührle's former home.
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens is an art museum within 17 acres of gardens, established in 1976, and located at 4339 Park Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, United States.
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea is a painting. It is the earliest of the London Nocturnes by James McNeill Whistler. It was conceived on the same August evening as Variations in Violet and Green. The two paintings were exhibited together at the Dudley Gallery.
Japonaiserie was the term the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh used to express the influence of Japanese art.
A Woman Walking in a Garden was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1887. As the title indicates, it depicts a woman walking through a garden. Greenery is everywhere and numerous trees can be seen in the background.
Almond Blossoms is from a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees. The works reflect the influence of Impressionism, Divisionism, and Japanese woodcuts. Almond Blossom was made to celebrate the birth of his nephew and namesake, son of his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo.
Asnières, now named Asnières-sur-Seine, is the subject and location of paintings that Vincent van Gogh made in 1887. The works, which include parks, restaurants, riverside settings and factories, mark a breakthrough in van Gogh's artistic development. In the Netherlands his work was shaped by great Dutch masters as well as Anton Mauve a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School and a significant early influence on his cousin-in-law van Gogh. In Paris van Gogh was exposed to and influenced by Impressionism, Symbolism, Pointillism, and Japanese woodblock print genres.
Seine (paintings) is the subject and location of paintings that Vincent van Gogh made in 1886. The Seine has been an integral part of Parisian life for centuries for commerce, travel and entertainment. Here van Gogh primarily captures the respite and relief from city life found in nature.
Still life paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Paris) is the subject of many drawings, sketches and paintings by Vincent van Gogh in 1886 and 1887 after he moved to Montmartre in Paris from the Netherlands. While in Paris, Van Gogh transformed the subjects, color and techniques that he used in creating still life paintings.
Memory of the Garden at Etten is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. It was executed in Arles around November 1888 and is in the collection of the Hermitage Museum. It was intended as decoration for his bedroom at the Yellow House.
Gabriel P. Weisberg is an American art historian.
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake is a woodblock print in the ukiyo-e genre by the Japanese artist Hiroshige. It was published in 1857 as part of the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and is one of the best known of Hiroshige's prints.
Rudolf Staechelin was a Swiss businessman and art collector. He is considered one of the major Swiss collectors of the first half of the 20th century.
Plum Park in Kameido is a woodblock print in the ukiyo-e genre by the Japanese artist Hiroshige. It was published in 1857 as the thirtieth print in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series and depicts Prunus mume trees in bloom.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Japonism . |