Japonisme, Vincent Van Gogh

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  I’m willing to bet that there is someone in your life who is totally enamoured with anything Japanese.

Perhaps they have walking through the May cherry blossoms in Osaka on their bucket list.  Maybe they’re passionate about anime or the heartfelt films of Miyazaki.  It might be ramen, J-pop, futuristic technology, or Zen Buddhism that captures their imagination.  Well, they would be right at home in late 19^th-century Paris.

After the restoration of the Meiji monarchy in 1868, Japan, formerly isolationist, opened itself up to global trade.  In 1871, Theodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi, two French art collectors, arrived in Paris laden with Japanese artefacts and artworks.  They brought samurai swords, silk robes, and priceless vases wrapped in elegantly illustrated woodblock prints.  This kicked off a craze known as Japonisme, where all things Japanese were the rage.  Writers published novels about far-eastern heroines, fashion houses adopted Japanese materials and silhouettes, and painters began to incorporate influences from woodblock prints into their art.

Van Gogh was among a great number of Parisian artists inspired by Japanese art.  Most especially the woodblock prints, known in Japanese as ukiyo-e, meaning ‘pictures of the floating world’.  These fascinated Van Gogh; their bold blocks of colour and their flattened perspective (as opposed to the rigidly realistic perspectives of many European paintings) were like nothing he’d ever seen, and their treatment of natural and everyday themes spoke deeply to his beliefs and sympathies.

During his time in Paris, Vincent collected over 600 Japanese prints, which are not in the care of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  The first two images are examples from two of the most famous Japanese printmakers, Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Vincent painted a couple of direct copies of Hiroshige’s works, including “Bridge in the Rain” and “Flowering Plum Orchard”.  These are careful, systematic and loving studies of the work, but with Vincent’s characteristic thick brush strokes and expressive colouring added.  An interesting detail on Bridge in the Rain is the Japanese lettering on the border, which Vincent copies without knowing the language.

Almond Blossom is a Van Gogh original work with a great debt to Japanese prints.  Painted in honour of his new nephew, the strange, flattened perspective of the branches and the block of the blue sky colour are inspired by the work of Hiroshige and Hokusai.  Yet its delicate composition and decorative quality, paired with elements that are unmistakably Vincent, such as the bold, thick colours and the personal symbolism of hope and new life, show how Van Gogh internalized Japanese aesthetics, not through imitation, but through transformation.

But it wasn’t just the formal characteristics of the woodblock prints that enraptured the artist.  He became deeply interested in the culture of this far-off land.  Like many 19^th-century artists with a romantic streak, Vincent took his cue from the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that modern society had a demoralizing effect on a person’s soul and that people were happier, healthier and more moral before the influences of modernity and civilization.  In Vincent, the idea of Japan provoked a nostalgic and deep longing for a place that still lived in deep communion with the natural world.  Vincent connected his anxieties about his rapidly changing society with an idealized version of Japan, and projected his dreams of a world of balance and spiritual harmony on this faraway place he would never see.

His fantasies of Japan were a part of the reason Vincent made his move to Arles.  Here, in his ‘Japan of the South’, he wished to live a more authentic life among people whom he believed to be still holding out against modernity and guarding their deep connections to nature.  He hoped to be able to experience firsthand this invigorating natural and spiritual environment and channel it into his work.  Japan would peek its head out again and again in Vincent’s output, a constant presence looming over his paintings like Mt. Fuji.