Page 52 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

Traditional Japanese patterns had

Ornamental a clear resonance with the type of design sought in later nineteenth-

Culture: Style century Europe and America. Bypassing narrative and pictorial reality,

and Meaning a European movement led by Owen Jones in the 18705 attempted to

in Edo Japan establish a direct connection between ornament and understanding. 1
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The aim was to bring about harmony through decoration, particularly

through patterns that forged a relationship between motif and ground.
N I C O L E C O O L I D G E

'The space was to be shallow and the relationships between figure
R O U S M A N I E R E

and ground were to be denned by colors as much as shape, thus creating

patterns in which figure and ground were almost indistinguishable." 2

According to Christopher Dresser, the famous English designer, who

had extensive experience in Japan:

Those works which are most fully of mental origin... are those which are the most noble....

Pictorial art can, in its highest development, only symbolize imagination or emotion by the

representation of idealized reality, [but] true ornamentation is of purely mental origin

and consists of symbolized imagination or emotion only I therefore argue that ornamenta-

tion is not only a fine art.... It is indeed a higher art than that practiced by the pictorial

artist, as it is wholly of mental origin. 3

Heated discourses on decoration in America and Europe at this

time were certainly informed by the Japanese conception of ornament.

Japan had emerged on the world stage in 1854 when Commodore Perry

and the American navy landed in Yokohama and demanded that Japan

Opposite: detail of Dish with /ailing snoiu/lakes design (cat. 19)