Japonism - the history of the art movement, Japanese woodblock prints, and the West's encounter with Japan

Japonism is the name of the art movement that changed the visual language of the West when Japanese art reached Europe after 1854. In less than fifty years, Japanese woodblock prints went from being exotic wrapping paper in import crates to becoming the single most important impulse behind Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Art Nouveau. The cropped composition, the empty space allowed to remain empty, the contour line that carries the image without shadows - almost everything we perceive as modern in a painting today has its roots in the printed sheets of the Edo period.

The word japonisme was introduced in 1872 by the French critic and collector Philippe Burty, who needed a term for something already in full swing in Parisian studios. Claude Monet assembled a collection of 231 Japanese woodblock prints in Giverny. Vincent van Gogh bought 660 prints in a single winter. Edgar Degas, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Gustav Klimt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all worked with devices borrowed from Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro. In Sweden, the same wave reached the artists' colony by Lake Racken in Värmland, and in 1919 Carl Larsson wrote the sentence that perhaps best sums up the entire movement: that as an artist, he regarded Japan as his homeland.

Contents
↓ What is Japonism?
↓ Historical background: when Japan opened its borders
↓ Japonism's most important works and artists
↓ Technique and visual language: what the West actually borrowed
↓ Japonism in Sweden
↓ Japonism in the home
↓ Timeline of Japonism
↓ Related art movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about Japonism

What is Japonism?

Japonism is the collective term for Japanese influence on Western art, applied arts, and design during the period roughly from 1860 to 1920. Unlike most art movements, Japonism has neither a manifesto, a founder, nor an exhibition marking its starting point. Rather, it is a way of seeing that spread from studio to studio, from Paris to Brussels, Vienna, London, and farther north to Scandinavia.

The term was coined by Philippe Burty in the journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique in 1872, and was initially used to describe the collecting of Japanese objects. Quite quickly, the word came to encompass something far more transformative: European painters began constructing their images according to Japanese principles instead of the Renaissance perspective tradition that had dominated since the fifteenth century. This is the difference between japonaiserie - depicting Japanese objects - and Japonism, thinking Japanese.

Quick facts: Japonism was active from around 1860 to 1920, primarily in France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Scandinavia. The term japonisme was coined in 1872 by the critic Philippe Burty. Triggering event: Japan's opening through the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 after more than 215 years of isolation. The breakthrough in Europe came with the World's Fair in Paris in 1867. Key source material: ukiyo-e, Japanese color woodcuts from the Edo period 1603–1868. Claude Monet owned 231 Japanese woodcuts in Giverny, Vincent van Gogh around 660 sheets. The art dealer Siegfried Bing published the journal Le Japon artistique in 36 issues from 1888–1891 in three languages. The movement went on to influence art nouveau, where Bing's shop Maison de l'Art Nouveau (1895–1901) gave the entire style its name.

Historical Background: When Japan Opened Its Borders

Japonism is inconceivable without a concrete political event. Under the Tokugawa shogunate's sakoku policy, Japan was effectively closed to the outside world from 1639, with the exception of strictly regulated trade through the Dutch trading post of Dejima outside Nagasaki. When Commodore Matthew Perry's American naval squadron forced the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, the ports were opened - and with them came a stream of objects unlike anything Europe had ever seen.

Sakoku and 215 Years of Isolation

During the period of isolation, Japanese visual art developed in an entirely distinct direction. Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world,” emerged as a mass-produced and inexpensive art form for Edo's bourgeoisie. Its subjects included actors, courtesans, landscapes, the seasons, and scenes from everyday life. The technique - color woodcuts with separate blocks for each color - produced flat, clearly delineated areas of color without modeling. Nothing in the European artistic tradition resembled it. If you would like to read more about its origins, see Bozetto's in-depth article on Japanese art and ukiyo-e.

The World's Fairs as a Driving Force for Dissemination

The often-retold anecdote that the painter Félix Bracquemond found a booklet of Hokusai's sketchbooks in 1856 being used as wrapping paper around imported porcelain is difficult to substantiate in detail, but it captures something real: the first sheets arrived in Europe as packaging material. The organized breakthrough came later. At the 1862 World's Fair in London, Japanese objects were displayed in the collection of the British diplomat Rutherford Alcock, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, Japan had its own official pavilion for the first time. After 1867, Japanese prints, fans, lacquerware, and ceramics became part of everyday Parisian artistic life.

Siegfried Bing and the publishing house of Japonisme

No single person did more to transform a fad into an art theory than the art dealer Siegfried Bing (1838-1905). He traveled to Japan himself around 1881, built up a stock of prints and decorative arts in Paris, and from 1888 to 1891 published the lavish monthly magazine Le Japon artistique simultaneously in French, English, and German - 36 issues with color plates that circulated throughout Europe. In 1895, Bing opened the Maison de l'Art Nouveau shop, which operated until 1901 and gave Art Nouveau its name. It is in Bing's premises that the line between Japonisme and Art Nouveau runs straight through.

The most important works and artists of Japonisme

Japonisme has no masterpieces of its own in the sense that they would belong exclusively to the movement. Instead, it is embedded in some of the best-known paintings of modern art. Here are the four strands that matter most.

Claude Monet: La Japonaise and the lily pond

In 1875, Monet painted the portrait La Japonaise, in which his wife Camille wears a magnificent red kimono embroidered with a samurai figure, surrounded by Japanese fans, as well as a blond wig to emphasize that she is European. The painting was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876 and sold that same year for 2,000 francs - a remarkable sum for Monet at the time. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired the work in 1956 for $45,000, and it still hangs there today.

But Monet's deeper Japonisme did not lie in the kimono. It lay in the garden at Giverny, where he had a Japanese bridge built over the lily pond, and in his collection of 231 Japanese woodcuts that still hang in the house - including 46 prints by Kitagawa Utamaro, 48 by Utagawa Hiroshige, and 23 by Katsushika Hokusai. The high horizon of the water-lily paintings, their absence of sky, and their emphasis on the surface rather than space are Japonisme in its purest form. Read more about Monet and Giverny.

Vincent van Gogh: 660 woodcuts and copies after Hiroshige

Van Gogh first encountered ukiyo-e in Antwerp in 1885. During the winter of 1886–87 in Paris, he and his brother Theo bought around 660 Japanese woodblock prints from Siegfried Bing, partly with the idea of trading them. The collection is largely preserved at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In March 1887, Vincent arranged his own exhibition of the prints at the café Le Tambourin, and that same year painted three works directly after Japanese originals, including a version of Hiroshige's Bridge in the Rain and a flowering plum tree, framed with Japanese characters he copied without understanding. Read more about Van Gogh's life and painting.

Edgar Degas and the Cropped Gaze

In Degas's work, Japonisme is visible not in the subject but in the cropping. His ballet scenes and bathing women are viewed from above at an angle, often with a figure cut off by the edge of the image and large areas of floor or wall left empty. That compositional principle comes almost verbatim from Hiroshige's city views, where a pole or tree trunk can cut straight through the foreground. The same device is used today by every photographer who deliberately lets the main subject lie at the edge of the frame.

Whistler, Klimt, and the Decorative Legacy

James McNeill Whistler was among the very first in London to collect Japanese prints, and his Nocturnes from the 1870s are based on the same idea of an image as a colored surface rather than a window. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt carried Japanese ornamental principles into his golden period: the patterned fields in The Kiss from 1907–08 bear a clear resemblance to Japanese textiles and lacquerware. In Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's work, ukiyo-e became poster art, with large flat areas of color, clear contours, and text integrated into the composition.

“...as an artist, Japan is my homeland.” – Carl Larsson, 1919

Technique and Visual Language: What the West Actually Borrowed

It is easy to believe that Japonisme was about cherry blossoms and kimonos. The real transfer was technical and structural, and it can be described through three principles that all break with the European academic tradition.

The Cropped Composition

In Hiroshige's series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, published in 118 prints from 1856–1858, a large object is often placed in the foreground - a seagull, a branch, a fire escape - cut off by the edge of the image and creating dramatic depth against a small, distant scene. European painting tradition required the subject to be complete and centered. Japonisme normalized the opposite, and the cropped image became the very signature of modern seeing. Bozetto's review of research on eye movements shows why cropping still works on a wall today.

The surface before depth

Japanese prints do not use central perspective with a vanishing point. They work with parallel perspective and stacked picture planes, meaning that the image never pretends to be a window. That was exactly the insight Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis and the Nabis group needed in order to argue that a painting is first and foremost a flat surface covered with colors in a particular order. From there, a straight line leads to all of twentieth-century abstraction.

The contour line and flat color

Because each color in a woodblock print is printed from its own block, the areas of color are even and clearly delineated, often held together by a printed contour line from the key block. Émile Bernard and Gauguin adopted this aesthetic as cloisonnism in Pont-Aven, and it subsequently became standard in poster and illustration art. The deliberate asymmetry also belongs here: Japanese composition avoids the central axis and works with an imbalance that nevertheless holds together. Katsushika Hokusai’s series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1830–1832, is the single series that spread most widely of all and still defines what many people mean by Japanese imagery.

Japonism in Sweden

Swedish Japonism is markedly under-researched compared with French Japonism, but it exists and is well documented. Swedish artists generally encountered Japanese art in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s, and brought those impressions home to a national-romantic context, where they merged with an interest in Swedish nature and Swedish craft.

The Rackstad artists around Lake Racken

The clearest Swedish Japonism can be found in the artists’ colony by Lake Racken outside Arvika in Värmland. Gustaf and Maja Fjæstad, Bror Lindh, Björn Ahlgrensson, ceramicist Hilma Persson-Hjelm and the group’s metalworkers worked from the 1890s with asymmetrical compositions, an emphasized picture plane and landscapes that almost lack depth - as well as with a Japan-inspired approach in which the boundary between art and craft was deliberately blurred. Gustaf and Maja Fjæstad owned Japanese woodblock prints themselves. The exhibition When Japan Came to Värmland, produced by Värmland Museum and shown at Thielska Galleriet from 17 February–3 June 2018, was the first comprehensive overview of the subject and formed part of the celebration of 150 years of diplomatic relations between Sweden and Japan, established in 1868.

The Collections: Ernest Thiel and the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities

Art patron Ernest Thiel shared the artists' interest. Four woodblock prints by the 18th-century master Kitagawa Utamaro from Thiel's own collection were rediscovered in the Thielska Gallery's storeroom ahead of the 2018 exhibition. Traces can also be found in Bruno Liljefors, whose bird studies against empty backgrounds are difficult to explain without ukiyo-e, and in Julia Beck. The institutional collection was built up later: the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm was founded in 1926 and now manages the state's largest collection of Japanese prints and applied arts. The connection between Japonism and Swedish national romanticism is therefore not a retrospective interpretation but something people at the time were fully aware of.

Japonism in the home

Japonism's visual language works exceptionally well on a contemporary wall, for one simple reason: it was built for print. Ukiyo-e was never created as unique originals but as editions, in standardized formats. The most common, ōban, measured approximately 39 × 26 centimetres - very close to the proportions of a modern 30 × 40. A Japanese motif therefore rarely needs to be cropped or enlarged to fit correctly in a standard frame.

Japandi: Japonism's contemporary successor

The style direction known in the 2020s as japandi is, in practice, Japonism's second wave. Here, Japanese reduction meets Nordic functionality in the same muted palette: light wood, untreated linen, few objects and plenty of empty space. It is the same aesthetic logic that the Rackstad artists followed 120 years ago. Bozetto's japandi collection brings together motifs in that tradition, while those looking for authentic Japanese prints can find Ohara Koson, whose bird and flower woodblock prints from the early 20th century are among the most sought-after of the period. Interested in how styles cross-pollinate? Also see how scanditalia combines Nordic restraint with Southern European warmth.

Placement, frame and space around the motif

The fundamental rule of Japonism is that the empty space is part of the image, not a mistake. This means a Japanese motif looks best with generous matting and a slim, discreet frame in black, light wood or natural wood. Avoid wide decorative frame mouldings - they compete with the contour line. If you hang several prints together, it works best to use the same frame and the same format, hung at even intervals, because a series-based approach is inherent to ukiyo-e. If you want to understand why Japanese motifs are perceived differently by different viewers, see Bozetto's overview of research on culture and the perception of art.

Tip: Position a Japonist motif so that the empty area of the image faces the open side of the room, not a piece of furniture. The composition of woodblock prints is asymmetrical and always has a centre of gravity and an emptiness – if you let the emptiness point out into the room, the image gains space, while the centre of gravity can meet the bookcase or the back of the sofa. The same principle means that a single well-placed print often has more impact than three motifs in a row.

Timeline of Japonisme

1639 – The Tokugawa shogunate implements sakoku and closes Japan to the outside world, with the exception of the Dutch trading post at Dejima. 1830–1832 – Katsushika Hokusai publishes Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa. 1854 – The Treaty of Kanagawa is signed on 31 March, and Japan opens the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate. 1856–1858 – Utagawa Hiroshige publishes One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 118 sheets, the series later copied by Van Gogh.

1862 – Japanese objects are shown to a broad European public at the world's fair in London. 1867 – Japan has its own pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, regarded as the breakthrough of Japonisme. 1868 – The Meiji Restoration begins in Japan, and diplomatic relations between Sweden and Japan are established the same year. 1872 – Philippe Burty coins the term Japonisme.

1875–1876 – Monet paints La Japonaise, which is shown at the second Impressionist exhibition and sold for 2,000 francs. 1886–1887 – Van Gogh acquires around 660 Japanese woodblock prints in Paris and exhibits them at Le Tambourin. 1888–1891 – Siegfried Bing publishes Le Japon artistique in 36 issues in three languages. 1890 – A major exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris reaches a new generation, including Mary Cassatt and Toulouse-Lautrec.

1895 – Bing opens Maison de l'Art Nouveau, and Japonisme transitions into Art Nouveau. 1899–1910 – The Rackstad artists in Värmland develop their Japanese-inspired synthesis of painting and crafts. 1907–1908 – Gustav Klimt paints The Kiss, in which the Japanese ornamental heritage reaches its best-known form. 1919 – Carl Larsson formulates his confession to Japan. 1926 – The Museum of East Asian Antiquities is founded in Stockholm. 2018 – Thielska Galleriet is showing When Japan Came to Värmland, the first comprehensive Swedish exhibition on the subject. 2025–2026 – The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa is showing Japonisme: New Perspectives from the Land of the Rising Sun from 12 March 2025 to 29 March 2026, and the Hunter Museum of American Art is showing Japonisme and America from 28 August 2025 to 13 July 2026, confirming that the subject is highly topical in the international museum world.

Related art movements

Japonism is an intersection rather than a dead end, and it touches almost every movement between 1860 and 1920. It is most closely associated with Impressionism, which took shape during exactly the same years and whose bright palette, scenes from everyday life, and bold cropping can hardly be explained without the Japanese prints. Next came Post-Impressionism, where Gauguin’s flat fields of color and Van Gogh’s contours are both direct borrowings. In a decorative direction, the trail leads to Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, which inherited the organic line and the principle that utilitarian objects should have an artistic form.

There is also an earlier parallel worth knowing about: chinoiserie, the 18th-century European dream of China, which was based on the same mixture of fascination and misunderstanding. The distinction is crucial - chinoiserie copied motifs, while Japonism borrowed methods. Bozetto has a separate guide to chinoiserie and its path into Swedish interior design. The complete overview of movements and artists in art history is collected in Bozetto’s knowledge bank.

Frequently asked questions about Japonism

Bring home the visual language of japonism

Japonism is the art movement that taught the West that an image can be asymmetrical, cropped and flat - and that is precisely why it still looks modern on a wall 150 years later. If you want to start somewhere, Ohara Koson's bird woodcuts are the most direct way in, while minimalist posters pick up where japonism ends and Nordic reduction takes over. Explore the full selection of artworks by famous artists at Bozetto, printed on 200-gram museum-quality paper and delivered throughout the Nordic region.