FAH262H1 Chap.3 Japanese Prints and Japonisme
Japanese Prints and Japonisme
Three parts in one week
Week 3 moves from Edo print culture to Meiji Tokyo and then to Paris.
Part I is Timon Screech's introduction to Sex and the Floating World (1999); the syllabus cites pages 9 to 13 and the course reading list 7 to 11, and the printed folios of the text itself run from 9 to 13. Part II is John Dower's essay on prints of domestic Westernisation between 1859 and 1912, with an optional essay on Kiyochika's Tokyo.
Part III is Shigemi Inaga's 2003 article on how Hokusai's reputation was made, with Phylis Floyd's encyclopedia entry on Japonisme as reference.
The week therefore asks one question three ways: who made these prints, who bought them at home, and who praised them abroad.
Inside the floating world
Screech studies erotic images from roughly the early eighteenth century to about 1820 and sets them in their social setting.
His key move is to define the floating world as a frame of mind with real addresses: the licensed quarters, and above all the Yoshiwara on Edo's north-eastern edge. Pictures linked those places to ordinary homes.
The key-term genres give you the vocabulary: brocade pictures, actor pictures, pictures of beauties, famous places, perspective pictures and optic-device pictures, with Okumura Masanobu, Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige as the names to know.
Screech also traces anxiety about such images, which he says peaked in the 1790s, a reminder that prints now hung in museums were once suspect.
Prints for civilisation and enlightenment
The Meiji slogan bunmei kaika produced enlightenment pictures, which the key-term list dates to about 1868 to 1900. Lawrence Smith rejects the old view that Meiji was a decline for the print and blames it on foreign collectors, who wanted Edo work and ignored the new styles.
Kobayashi Kiyochika learned from the photographer Shimooka Renjo, the illustrator Charles Wirgman, and the painters Kawanabe Kyosai and Shibata Zeshin before turning to cartoons after 1881. The key-term list names his contemporary Yoshu Chikanobu; Smith calls the same artist, with the same dates of 1838 to 1912, Toyohara Chikanobu.
Smith praises Chikanobu's early Meiji actor portraits for their crisp use of darker dyes.
How Europe met Japanese art
Floyd shows that the first Western encounter is disputed. One account has Felix Bracquemond finding a volume of Hokusai's Manga in a Paris print shop in 1856; another credits the American John La Farge, collecting from the same year.
Dutch traders at Dejima had already sent prints and books to European collections before Perry's treaty of 1854. Shops such as Farmer and Roger's in London, opened in 1862, and the London and Paris exhibitions of 1862 and 1867 widened access. In 1860s France the collectors Floyd names include Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Manet, Degas and Monet.
Floyd lists asymmetrical composition, flatter modelling, pure colour and expressive line as the main lessons artists drew, and credits Japanese art with a part in the rise of formalist aesthetics.
A reputation with a history
Inaga's question is historical rather than aesthetic: what conditions let a print craftsman be ranked with Michelangelo and Rembrandt?
His answer runs through French republican criticism, the defence of Manet and the Impressionists, and a market in which Hokusai mattered enough for Siegfried Bing to dispute a Hokusai biography with Hayashi Tadamasa and Edmond de Goncourt in 1896. Later voices retreated: Michel Revon in 1896, the official Japanese art history of 1900, and Henri Focillon, who in 1914 and 1925 recast Hokusai as an artisan and then as a voice of Asia.
Inaga's point is that each verdict tells you as much about the judge as about Hokusai.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Screech's floating world and the Yoshiwara
- 02
Key-term print genres from actor pictures to optic-device pictures
- 03
Enlightenment pictures and Kobayashi Kiyochika
- 04
First Western encounters with Japanese prints, 1856 to 1867
- 05
Burty, Duret and Gonse make Hokusai a master
- 06
Inaga's three corrections: composition, line and colour
- 07
Hokusai's reputation after 1896
Worked example · free
Trace how French critics turned Hokusai into a master
- 2Name the champions and dates: Burty (1866), Chesneau (1868), Duret (1882) and Gonse (1883), and their republican, anti-academic stance.
- 2Show the use: Hokusai's composition, sketching and colour were cited to justify Manet and the Impressionists.
- 2Assess accuracy with Inaga's corrections: European perspective behind the composition, trained copying behind the sketches, imported Prussian blue behind the colour.
Key terms
- Floating World
- A state of mind apart from everyday duty, in Screech's account, anchored in Edo's licensed quarters with the Yoshiwara at its apex.
- Kaika-e
- Enlightenment pictures: early Meiji prints of about 1868 to 1900 tied to the slogan bunmei kaika, civilisation and enlightenment.
- Japonaiserie
- Western-manner pictures of Japanese things and themes, a surface borrowing that twentieth-century scholars separate from Japonisme's deeper absorption of Japanese aesthetics.
- Megane-e
- Optic-device pictures, a key-term print genre connected with the imported lensed equipment that Screech discusses under new eighteenth-century ways of seeing.
- Prussian Blue
- A chemical pigment, also called Berlin blue, invented about 1706 and imported into Japan; Henry Smith argues Hokusai's Fuji colours depended on it.
Japanese Prints and Japonisme FAQ
Who first used the word Japonisme?
Floyd credits Philippe Burty, a French critic, collector and printmaker, writing in 1872. He meant a new artistic, historical and ethnographic field covering Japanese-style objects, paintings of Japanese scenes and Western work shaped by Japanese aesthetics.
Did Van Gogh see Japanese surimono albums?
Inaga offers it as his own hypothesis. Duret owned a three-volume surimono album assembled by the kyoka poet Nagashima Masahide, now in the French national library, which could explain Van Gogh's belief that Japanese artists exchanged works.
When was the first Japanese biography of Hokusai published?
In 1893. Begun by Kobayashi Bunshichi and completed by Iijima Hanjuro, it was undertaken at French request, according to Inaga, and it sat at the centre of the 1896 publishing quarrel over Hokusai in Paris.
Exam move
Write the dates 1814, 1856, 1866, 1872, 1882, 1883, 1896 and 1900 down the margin and attach one person and one claim about Hokusai to each. Then explain in three sentences why Inaga calls the French reading of Hokusai biased but productive.
