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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 Bakumatsu 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.Davis, Aaron, " Japanese Influence On Western Architecture Part 2: The Early Craftsmen Movement" Nakamoto Forestry, May 28, 2019; accessed 2020.09.16. Even the performing arts were affected; Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is perhaps the best example.
From the 1860s, ukiyo-e, moku hanga, became a source of inspiration for many Western artists. These prints were created for the commercial market in Japan. 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. Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color and composition. Ukiyo-e prints featured dramatic foreshortening and asymmetrical compositions.
Japanese , 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 cloissoné 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.
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. The exporting of porcelain was further boosted by the effects of the Ming-Qing transition, which immobilized the center of Chinese porcelain production in Jingdezhen for several decades. Japanese potters filled the void making porcelain for European tastes. Porcelain and lacquered objects became the main exports from Japan to Europe.Chisaburo, Yamada. "Exchange of Influences in the Fine Arts between Japan and Europe." Japonisme in Art: An International Symposium (1980): 14. 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, but the ownership of a few pieces was possible for a wide and increasing social range of the middle class. Marie Antoinette and Maria Theresa are known collectors of Japanese lacquerware, and their collections are often exhibited in the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles. The European imitation of Asian lacquerwork is referred to as Japanning.
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. Shops such as La Porte Chinoise specialized in the sale of Japanese and Chinese imports. La Porte Chinoise, in particular, attracted artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas who drew inspiration from the prints. It and other shops organized gatherings which facilitated the spread of information regarding Japanese art and techniques.
Van Gogh's Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887) is a portrait of his color merchant, Julien Tanguy. Van Gogh created two versions of this portrait. Both versions feature backdrops of Japanese prints 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. He filled the portrait of Tanguy with vibrant colors as he believed that buyers were no longer interested in grey-toned Dutch paintings and that paintings with many colors would be considered modern and desirable.
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.
Similar to many Japanese artists, Degas' prints focus on women and their daily routines. 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. In Degas' print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery (1879–80), the artist uses of two figures, one seated and one standing, which is a common composition in Japanese prints. Degas also continued to use lines to create depth and separate space within the scene. His most clear appropriation is of the woman leaning on a closed umbrella, which is borrowed directly from Hokusai's Manga.
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.
| Alfred Stevens | 1823 | 1906 | Belgian | Realism, Genre painting |
| James Tissot | 1836 | 1902 | French | Genre art, Realism |
| James McNeill Whistler | 1834 | 1903 | American | Tonalism, Realism, Impressionism |
| Édouard Manet | 1832 | 1883 | French | Realism, Impressionism |
| Claude Monet | 1840 | 1926 | French | Impressionism |
| Vincent van Gogh | 1853 | 1890 | Dutch | Post-Impressionism |
| Edgar Degas | 1834 | 1917 | French | Impressionism |
| Pierre-Auguste Renoir | 1841 | 1919 | French | Impressionism |
| Camille Pissarro | 1830 | 1903 | Danish-French | Impressionism, Post-Impressionism |
| Paul Gauguin | 1848 | 1903 | French | Post-Impressionism, Primitivism |
| Mortimer Menpes | 1855 | 1938 | Australian | Aestheticism |
| Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | 1864 | 1901 | French | Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau |
| Mary Cassatt | 1844 | 1926 | American | Impressionism |
| George Hendrik Breitner | 1857 | 1923 | Dutch | Amsterdam Impressionism |
| Bertha Lum | 1869 | 1954 | American | Japanese Styled Prints |
| William Bradley | 1801 | 1857 | English | Portrait |
| Aubrey Beardsley | 1872 | 1898 | English | Art Nouveau, Aestheticism |
| Arthur Wesley Dow | 1857 | 1922 | American | Arts and Crafts Revival, Japanese Styled Prints |
| Gustave Léonard de Jonghe | 1829 | 1893 | Belgian | Social Realism, Realism, Orientalism |
| Alphonse Mucha | 1860 | 1939 | Czech | Art Nouveau |
| Gustav Klimt | 1862 | 1918 | Austrian | Art Nouveau, Symbolism |
| Pierre Bonnard | 1867 | 1947 | French | Post-Impressionism |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | 1867 | 1959 | American | Prairie School |
| Charles Rennie Mackintosh | 1868 | 1928 | Scottish | Symbolism, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Glasgow School |
| Louis Comfort Tiffany | 1848 | 1933 | American | Jewelry and glass designer |
| Helen Hyde | 1868 | 1919 | American | Japanese Styled Prints |
| Georges Ferdinand Bigot | 1860 | 1927 | French | Cartoon |
The successor to The Mikado as Europe's most popular Japan drama, Sidney Jones' opera The Geisha (1896) added the title character to the stock characters representing Japan, the figure of the geisha belongs to the "objects" which in and of themselves meant Japan in Germany and throughout the West. The period from 1904 to 1918 saw a European boom in geisha dramas. The most famous of these was, Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In 1900, Puccini saw a staging of David Belasco's play of the same name and reportedly found it so moving that he wept. The popularity of the opera brought on a slew of Madame Something or Others, including Madames Cherry, Espirit, Flott, Flirt, Wig-Wag, Leichtsinn, and Tip Top, all of whom appeared around 1904 and disappeared relatively quickly. They were not without lasting effect, however, and the geisha had established herself among the scrolls, jade, and images of Mount Fuji that signified Japan to the West. Much as this human figure of the geisha was reduced to the level of other objects signifying Japan in the drama, Japanese performers in Germany served German play wrights in their quest to renew the German drama. Just as ukiyo-e had proven useful in France, severed from any understanding of Japan, the troupes of Japanese actors and dancers that toured Europe provided materials for "a new way of dramatizing" on stage. Ironically, the popularity and influence of these Japanese dramas had a great deal to do with the westernization of the Japanese theater in general and of the pieces performed in Europe in particular.
Invented for the Kabuki theatre in Japan in the 18th century, the revolving stage was introduced into Western theater at the Residenz Theatre in Munich in 1896 under the influence of japonism fever. The Japanese influence on German drama first appeared in stage design. Karl Lautenschlager adopted the Kabuki revolving stage in 1896 and ten years later Max Reinhardt employed it in the premiere of Frühlings Erwachen by Frank Wedekind. Soon this revolving stage was a trend in Berlin. Another adaptation of the Kabuki stage popular among German directors was the Blumensteg, a jutting extension of the stage into the audience. The European acquaintance with Kabuki came either from travels in Japan or from texts, but also from Japanese troupes touring Europe. In 1893, Kawakami Otojiro and his troupe of actors arrived in Paris, returning again in 1900 and playing in Berlin in 1902. Kawakami's troop performed two pieces, Kesa and Shogun, both of which were westernized and were performed without music and with the majority of the dialogue eliminated. This being the case, these performances tended toward pantomime and dance. Dramatists and critics quickly latched on to what they saw as a “re-theatricalization of the theater.” Among the actors in these plays was Sada Yacco, first Japanese star in Europe, who influenced pioneers of modern dance such as Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan; she performed for Queen Victoria in 1900, and enjoyed the status of a European star.
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 , which owed their quite separate origins in the West to the mid-19th century desire to grow Alpine plants 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.Genevieve Aitken, Marianne Delafond. La collection d'estampes Japonaises de Claude Monet. La Bibliotheque des Arts. 2003. He also planted a large number of native Japanese species to give it a more exotic feeling.
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