Page 21 - Sotheby's London Fine Japanese Art Nov. 2019

VAN GOGH AND JA PANESE PR INTS

The impact of Japanese woodcut prints
on the development of art in France in the
th
second half of the 19 century, by helping
forward-thinking artists to liberate them-
selves from the chains of academic conven-
tions and tradition, cannot be overstated.
After Japan had formally resumed its direct
trading relations with the West in 1858,
Japanese artefacts quickly flooded European
shores. The hugely popular and regularly
staged World Fairs, where Japanese prints
were exhibited, initiated a craze for Japanese
art and culture which quickly spread from
connoisseurs and artists to the wider public.
Until then, Japanese art had been relatively
unknown in Europe, owing to the country’s
isolationist policy, which had lasted for more
than two centuries during the Edo period
(1603–1867).
In the 1870s important collections were
formed, by influential writers as well as by
public institutions and by artists, namely
Degas, Whistler, Monet and Rodin, and later
Gauguin and van Gogh. In 1878 the French
Art Historian Ernest Chesneau explained
in his article Le Japon à Paris what made
Japanese prints so attractive to Western
eyes: “One could not stop admiring the unex-
pectedness of the compositions, the understand-
ing of form, the richness of tone, the originality
of the picturesque effect, together with the sim- Fig. 1 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
plicity of the means used to obtain such results.” Portrait du pere Tanguy 1887, Musee Rodin, Paris
1
Dim. 0,92x0,73 m
Van Gogh’s first profound assessment Photo Josse/Scala, Florence
of Japanese prints coincided with his very
productive and experimental period in Paris. purity, and saw the perfect remedy for the landscapes, flower studies, geishas, and
Within a short period of time he built up diseases of Europe’s urban modernity in several of them can be identified in his large
a collection of around 600 prints, exhibit- Japan. 2 collection. The following year, van Gogh,
ing them in the spring of 1887 in the Café Van Gogh worked extensively with his now living in Arles, had become more inde-
du Tambourin, a popular meeting place Japanese prints, initially tracing them and pendent in his work with Japanese prints. In
for avant-garde artists. In 1888 he decided producing relatively close copies. In 1887 terms of composition, several of his paint-
to leave Paris for Provence, a region he he incorporated several of them as painted ings depicting trees in blossom resemble
perceived to be most comparable to Japan, backdrops in the portrait of the paint dealer Hiroshige’s The Sumida River Embankment in
where – according to him – art and spirit Père Tanguy whom he depicted in a pose Edo (Tôto Sumida-zutsumi) (LOT 20), another
flourished and artists could live and work in similar to a seated Buddha (see Fig. 1). The print from the above-mentioned series. As
harmony with nature without the constrain- image of Mount Fuji positioned above a result of learning from Japanese art van
ing conventions of academic tradition. Van Tanguy’s head was very likely inspired by Gogh gained his own distinctive style. This
Gogh had developed these ideas after having Utagawa Hiroshige’s print The Sagami River encounter with his Japanese “role models”
read novels by Edmond de Goncourt, Émile (Sagami gawa) from the series The Thirty- would prove to be the most important and
Guimet and Félix Régamey who sketched Six Views of Mt. Fuji (LOT 20). The other decisive encounter of his whole artistic life. 3
highly idealised images of Japan. Most prints in the background were selected by 1. English translation quoted in Van Gogh and Japan (exhibition cata-
contemporary French authors understood van Gogh to show the breadth of different logue), Van Gogh Museum, 2018, p. 18.
2. See Elizabeth Childs Auf der Suche nach dem Atelier des Südens (exhibi-
Japan as frozen in a timeless, “premodern” genres depicted in Japanese prints, namely tion catalogue), Städel Museum, 2001, pp. 126–127.
3. See Matthias Arnold, Van Gogh und seine Vorbilder, 1996, p. 166.
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