Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese Imagery in Europe in Nineteenth-Century Public Collections

Abstract

This study identifies the Japanese images acquired by selected European museums and libraries in the nineteenth century. Since the emphasis in the field of japonisme has traditionally been placed on the French discovery, the Japanese holdings of French — in particular Parisian — institutions are examined in greatest depth. (These include the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.) The collections of two British institutions, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, are also discussed.Japanese images were acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale as early as 1795. Two significant early collections were added in 1843 and 1855, even before trade between France and Japan was officially established. Among these works a broad spectrum of Japanese styles was represented, although a majority of the prints were contemporaneous publications, and the drawings were copies after historic paintings. The article concludes with a discussion of these popular images in the context of European aesthetic concerns of the mid- to late nineteenth century, and an appendix of Japanese art in early public collections in Paris.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.