Japonisme: How Japan Changed European Art and Design

Japonisme is the strong influence of Japanese art and crafts on European and American art and design after Japan was opened to trade in the 1850s. Japanese woodblock prints, ceramics and textiles revealed a new visual world: flat fields of colour, bold crops, asymmetry and everyday subjects. The Impressionists, van Gogh, Whistler and the designers of Art Nouveau were all affected by it.

Facts

A country opened up

During the Edo period Japan was largely closed to Western trade; only the Dutch were allowed to trade, via a small island at Nagasaki. When American ships forced an agreement in 1854, and several trade treaties followed in 1858, Japanese objects began to flow into Europe and the United States. They were porcelain, lacquerware, textiles, fans and cheap colour woodblock prints.

The world's fairs made a great impression. In London in 1862 a collection of Japanese objects was shown, and in Paris in 1867 Japan took part with a section of its own. Shops in Paris and London sold Japanese goods, and artists began collecting woodblock prints. In 1872 the French critic Philippe Burty coined the word japonisme for the new taste.

What the artists learned

Since the Renaissance, European art had built its pictures on linear perspective, shading and a clear focal point. In the Japanese woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, there was something quite different: flat fields of colour with black outlines, a high horizon, figures cut off by the edge of the picture, empty areas and a foreground that thrusts into the picture, such as a branch or a post.

This matched what many young painters were already seeking. They wanted to move away from the academy's dark, shaded pictures and to capture modern life, the fleeting moment and the everyday. The Japanese pictures showed that an image could be decorative yet lively, simple yet bold.

The Impressionists and Whistler

Claude Monet collected Japanese woodblock prints and hung them on the walls of his home in Giverny, where he also had a Japanese bridge built over the water-lily pond. In 1876 he painted his wife Camille in a red Japanese kimono. Edgar Degas learned from the prints to crop, to see the scene obliquely from above and to let empty areas of floor carry the picture, as in The Dance Class.

Mary Cassatt saw a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris in 1890 and afterwards made a series of colour prints of women in everyday life, with flat patterns and clear lines. The American-born James McNeill Whistler in London painted women in kimonos surrounded by porcelain, gave his pictures musical titles and decorated the famous Peacock Room in blue and gold. His nocturnal views of the Thames learned from Hiroshige's bridges and mist.

Van Gogh: Japan as a dream

Vincent van Gogh bought hundreds of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris and exhibited them in a café in 1887. That same year he copied in oil two of Hiroshige's prints from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a flowering plum tree and a bridge in the rain, after Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge. He intensified the colours and painted borders with Japanese characters that he had borrowed from other prints.

When he moved to Arles in the south of France in 1888 he wrote to his brother that he wanted to see the landscape with Japanese eyes. The clear colours, the black outlines and the flat surfaces of his late painting are partly Japanese lessons; compare the guide to Post-Impressionism. Paul Gauguin and the circle around him were also influenced by the flat surfaces of the Japanese pictures.

Posters, glass and Art Nouveau

The influence was just as great in design. The Paris art dealer Siegfried Bing sold Japanese objects and published the magazine Le Japon artistique in 1888–1891; his shop Maison de l'Art Nouveau, from 1895, gave its name to an entire style. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec turned the figures of his posters into silhouettes in flat colours, as in a woodblock print, and Alphonse Mucha wound his lines around them.

Émile Gallé made glass with Japanese motifs such as dragonflies and plants, and in the United States Louis Comfort Tiffany drew inspiration from the same visual world. The designer Christopher Dresser travelled to Japan in 1876–1877 and was one of the first European designers to study Japanese craftsmanship on the spot. Read more in the design section on Art Nouveau, the guide to Art Nouveau and Art Deco and the history of Japanese design in the Meiji period, when Japan itself began to manufacture for the Western market.

How to recognise Japonisme

Look for the objects first: fans, kimonos, screens, porcelain and woodblock prints on the wall in the background. Then look at the form. Is the picture cropped so that figures are cut off by the edge, is the horizon high, are there large empty areas and flat fields of colour with clear outlines, and is the composition asymmetrical? If so, the Japanese influence is probable.

Japonisme waned after 1900 but left a lasting legacy. The flat, decorative picture led on to Fauvism and abstract art, and Japanese simplicity became important again for 20th-century architecture and design. Also read the guide to Impressionism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which of these artists copied a Hiroshige woodblock print in oil?