Japonisme and Western Impressionism / Post-Impressionism

I'm taking ARTH276 (Impressionism) with Professor Andre Dombrowski this semester as an elective, and I highly recommend the class to anyone interested! Impressionist paintings have always been fascinating to me and the class really opened my eyes to the contexts (political, social, scientific, etc) from which the movement emerged.

In this blog post I wanted to briefly talk about my guided visual analysis paper that I wrote recently. My topic was about the influence of Japanese wood prints (from the Edo period) on Western paintings in the later half of the nineteenth century.

I basically talked about three Impressionist / Post-Impressionist paintings and how the artists drew inspiration from three specific ukiyo-e wood prints. My exploration of Japonisme's influence was threefold: formal influence, subject matter, and themes.

Here are the paintings I focused on and the Japanese pieces I compared them with:

Vincent van Gogh, The Sower 1888 

Utagawa Hiroshige, Plum Estate, Kameido 1857 

James McNeil Whistler, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, 1865 

Chōbunsai Eishi, Ohane and Ofuku 1794-95 

Mary Cassatt, Maternal Caress 1890-91

Kitagawa Utamaro, Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child 1790

This paper was really interesting for me to research and write because I'm a big fan of ukiyo-e art, and because I attended an exhibition specifically on Japonisme's influence on artists like van Gogh, Whistler and Monet in Kyoto during a field trip for my high school Visual Art class. I also think it's interesting to think about this historical interaction between the East and the West in light of the conversations we've had in class about cultural influence versus appropriation. 

Because I took this art history class I feel as though I have a slightly better understanding of the paintings I've seen in museums in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto and more, and I hope to go back and see them again some day! 

- Eugenie