This book examines the transnational phenomenon of Japonisme in the exoticist and “autoexoticist” literature of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the way in which reciprocal processes of transcultural acquisition – by Japan and from Japan – were portrayed in the medium of literature, the book illustrates how literary Japonisme and the wider processes whereby Japan, with its alien exotic culture and unique refined aestheticism, was absorbing Western civilization in its own way in the late nineteenth century at the same time as the phenomenon of Japonisme was occurring in Western fine arts, which were inspired by traditional Japanese artistic practices. Specifically, the book focuses on the literary works of Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti, who travelled from France and America, respectively, to Japan, and Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, who in turn went, respectively, to Germany and England from Japan. Exploring the eclectic hybridity of Japan’s modernization during the late nineteenth century, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature.

Japan's door to the outside world was opened in 1858, ending a 200-year period of total isolation. The wealth of superb Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork and architecture, as well as printmaking and painting, reached the West and brought with it electrifying new ideas of composition, colour and design. In this book, Siegfried Wichmann, the internationally renowned expert on Japonisme, accompanies his breathtaking illustrations with a text that marshals a wealth of detail and opens up new lines of enquiry.

In her book, Pamela Genova suggests that as critics move in general from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, the mutability of the phenomenon is highlighted in a rich and illuminating manner. By exploring the conditions of the creation of these works, accenting the original aims of the artists, the manipulations carried out by art dealers, gallery owners, and boutique managers, as well as the gestures of explanation, interpretation, and judgment offered by the professional and amateur critics, Japonisme takes on an even more versatile nature. Further, a complex web of correspondence germinates among these artists—both French and Japanese—and their many critics. It is in this light that the truly rich character of Japonisme comes forth, since the undesirability, even the impossibility of the attempt to reduce it to a single genre, style, era, or cultural cadre attests to its elusiveness and its Protean nature. Japonisme does not correspond to a single dictionary definition, no matter how subtle or self-aware that definition might be. By situating the dynamics of Japonisme as a response on the part of French culture to the culture of Japan, we gain a keener sense of the multiplicity of modern French sensibility itself, of how the awareness of a nation’s language, history, and art forms can be creatively reflected in the images of a culture seemingly radically different from its own.

Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme. This book examines the nineteenth century art world against this background and explores Japanese influences on four artists working in Britain in particular: the American James McNeill Whistler, the Australian Mortimer Menpes, and the 'Glasgow boys' George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Japonisme in Britian is richly illustrated throughout.

The complex and coherent development of Japanese art during the course of the nineteenth century was inadvertently disrupted by a political event: the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Scholars of both the preceding Edo (1615–1868) and the succeeding Meiji (1868–1912) eras have shunned the decades bordering this arbitrary divide, thus creating an art-historical void that the former view as a period of waning technical and creative inventiveness and the latter as one threatened by Meiji reforms and indiscriminate westernization and modernization. Challenging Past and Present, to the contrary, demonstrates that the period 1840–1890, as seen progressively rather than retrospectively, experienced a dramatic transformation in the visual arts, which in turn made possible the creative achievements of the twentieth century. The first group of chapters takes as its theme the diverse cultural currents of the transitional period, particularly as they applied to art.The second section deals with the inconsistent yet determinedly pragmatic courses pursed by artists, entrepreneurs, and patrons to achieve a secure footing in the uncertain terrain of early Meiji. Further chapters look at how painters and sculptors sought to absorb and integrate foreign influences and reinterpret their own stylistic mediums.

A collection of 20 fairy tales from Japan including "Chin-Chin Kobakama," "The Serpent with Eight Heads," and "The Tea-Kettle."

Japonisme, the nineteenth-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the twenty-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement. This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clémence d'Ennery (1823–1898), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the “Musée d'Ennery” to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a fifty-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d'Ennery's struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day. Travelers to Japan such as the Duchesse de Persigny, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Laure Durand- Fardel returned with souvenirs that they shared with friends and family. Salon hostesses including Juliette Adam, Louise Cahen d'Anvers, Princesse Mathilde, and Marguerite Charpentier provided venues for the discussion and examination of Japanese art objects, as did well-known art dealers Madame Desoye, Madame Malinet, Madame Hatty, and Madame Langweil. Writers, actresses, and artists-Judith Gautier, Thérèse Bentzon, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few- took inspiration from the Japanese material in circulation to create their own unique works of art. Largely absent from the history of Japonisme, these women-and many others-actively collected Japanese art, interacted with auction houses and art dealers, and formed collections now at the heart of museums such as the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi, the Musée Unterlinden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.