Japonisme

Japonisme is an art movement dating from 1858. The gallery holds 315 works in this movement, including works by James Tissot, Édouard Vuillard and Katsushika Hokusai. Browse Japonisme paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Japonisme is the term for the pervasive influence of Japanese art and design on Western art during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The French critic and collector Philippe Burty coined the word in 1872 to name the vogue then sweeping Paris. Its catalyst was political: after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation, Japan was forced to reopen to foreign trade in 1858, and a flood of goods followed. Ceramics, lacquerware, fans, textiles and, above all, inexpensive ukiyo-e woodblock prints poured into European markets—by some estimates well over 100,000 prints reached Paris between the late 1850s and 1870. International exhibitions, especially the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, gave the public its first concentrated exposure to Japanese aesthetics.

What artists absorbed was less a subject than a grammar. Ukiyo-e masters such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige offered flat planes of unmodulated colour, bold asymmetrical compositions, steep or aerial viewpoints, abrupt cropping that pushed figures to the edge, expanses of empty space, and a frank delight in decorative pattern and everyday life. To European eyes trained on Renaissance perspective and academic finish, these conventions suggested a radically modern way of organising a picture.

James McNeill Whistler was among the first Western painters to collect Japanese art, and works such as La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and his Nocturnes translate that economy into tonal restraint. Édouard Manet embedded a Japanese print and screen in his Portrait of Émile Zola (1868); Claude Monet painted La Japonaise and later built the Japanese footbridge at Giverny; Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt adopted its croppings and high vantage points. Vincent van Gogh went furthest, painting outright copies after Hiroshige such as Bridge in the Rain. James Tissot, also represented here, was both an avid collector and a painter of Japanese motifs.

Japonisme proved foundational to modern art. Its flattening and stylisation fed Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, shaped Toulouse-Lautrec's posters and the intimate interiors of the Nabis (Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard), and supplied Art Nouveau with its sinuous line and decorative surface—an exchange that ran in dialogue with the ukiyo-e tradition itself.