Japonisme

About

After Japan's ports reopened to Western trade in the 1850s, woodblock prints, fans, lacquer, ceramics and textiles reached Paris and London in quantity, and Japanese displays at the international exhibitions of 1862 in London and 1867 in Paris caused a sensation. Artists collected prints by Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige and found a new visual grammar.

The borrowings are easy to spot: high or tilted viewpoints, figures cut off at the edge, flat areas of colour, strong outlines and empty space. James Abbott McNeill Whistler posed models in kimonos and signed with a butterfly monogram modelled on Japanese seals. Vincent van Gogh copied Hiroshige prints in oil in 1887. Mary Cassatt's colour prints of 1891 mimicked woodblock effects in drypoint and aquatint, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters put flat colour and silhouettes onto Paris walls. Potters such as Jean-Joseph Carriès and Auguste Delaherche studied Japanese stoneware and its glazes.