Japonisme is the influence of Japanese art on Western painting, printmaking and design in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its main source was ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world," the colored woodblock prints of Japan.
Painters in Paris and London borrowed from these sheets: flat areas of bright color with no shading, firm outlines, figures cut off by the edge of the picture, scenes seen from above and the main subject pushed to one side.
Bridge in the Rain, shown above, is a copy. The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh made it in oil, in Paris, in 1887, from a print by Utagawa Hiroshige, one of the most popular landscape artists in Japan. A Western painter, already trained, sat down to learn from a sheet of Japanese paper.
The word japonisme is French. The Paris critic Philippe Burty coined it in 1872, when Japanese objects were already in fashion in the city. Those objects had a name of their own, japonaiserie, modeled on chinoiserie, the older European taste for Chinese-style decoration.
Japonaiserie meant the fans, kimonos, lacquer boxes and prints themselves, and the taste for owning them. Japonisme names the next step, when artists began to learn from the way those prints were drawn and composed.
A painter could dress a model in a kimono and still paint her exactly as the Paris schools taught. The French painter Claude Monet did just that in La Japonaise, exhibited in Paris in 1876, where the kimono and the fans are only props.
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The prints themselves were nothing precious in Japan. In Edo, the city now called Tokyo, one cost about as much as a bowl of noodles and was just as easy to find.
They showed kabuki actors, the stars of the popular theater, along with courtesans, the celebrated women of the pleasure quarter, famous views and street life. They were made to be sold in large numbers.
In Paris, the same sheets ended up pinned to studio walls. Artists studied them, copied them by hand and collected them in quantity, and Van Gogh alone owned hundreds.
Each painter took something different from them. Monet borrowed the objects they showed, Degas their framing, Van Gogh their colors and Toulouse-Lautrec their way of setting words beside an image.
How Japanese prints reached Paris
None of these sheets would have reached Paris if Japan had not reopened its ports to Western trade in 1853, after a long period of closed borders. How the first ones then reached European studios was later told in several versions, most of them involving goods that had nothing to do with art.
What You'll Discover
What the prints did that Paris painting avoided.
Why Monet's kimono is not quite japonisme.
What Degas borrowed from the prints.
Why Van Gogh copied Hiroshige by hand.
Who carried the lessons into posters and design.