How Japanese prints changed Western art

In the second half of the 19th century, Japanese colour woodblock prints reached Europe and America, and artists there studied them closely. The works below bring the prints together with paintings, pastels and lithographs by artists who, according to the museums that hold them, learned from Japan. The museum texts keep returning to the same few ideas: flat planes of colour, simplified shapes, unusual cropping, domestic subjects and a new way of balancing dark and light.

What the prints looked like

Mount Fuji, Japan's highest mountain, appeared in most Japanese travel literature of the 19th century. Maps sometimes marked it with a little Fuji-shaped icon and showed where travellers could get the best view. Between 1829 and 1833 Katsushika Hokusai made a series of thirty-six views of the mountain, including South Wind, Clear Sky, sometimes known as "Red Fuji". The season is the time between late summer and early autumn, when the mountain takes on a reddish hue. The whole picture is built from a few broad areas of colour.

Utagawa Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857) was published two years after the great earthquake and fire of 1855 and shows the newly rebuilt Great Bridge over the Sumida River in Edo, today's Tokyo. People try to protect themselves from sheets of rain as they cross the bridge in opposite directions, with the Atake district in the distance. The Cleveland Museum of Art singles it out as an example of Hiroshige's skill in capturing weather and atmosphere.

Another Hiroshige print of 1857, Meguro Drum Bridge and Sunset Hill, shows an arched stone bridge over the Meguro River, called the Drum Bridge because its rounded profile resembled a drum. People shield themselves from the snow with hats and umbrellas as they cross. In the lower right, behind the artist's signature, is the roof of a shop called Shōgatsu-ya, which served shiruko mochi, a sweet red-bean soup with rice cakes eaten in winter. Ordinary life, weather and a specific place are the subject.

Japanese prints could also be playful. Hokusai designed his series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by an Old Nurse (1835–36) as if a confused nurse were illustrating classical poems and missing their allusions. For a poem by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro about sleeping alone through long autumn nights, she imagines instead the exhausting work of fishermen dragging a net upstream. Contemporary viewers would have enjoyed the comic gap between word and image.

Whistler, an early admirer

James McNeill Whistler was, in the museum's words, a pioneer in appreciating the effects of Japanese prints, and his art is characterised by a subtlety and delicacy the museum calls Asian. After being expelled from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point he went to Europe and lived as an artist-bohemian in Paris and then London. He signed his work with a butterfly monogram.

In 1872 Whistler was commissioned to design two of the 35 monumental portrait mosaics for the south court of the South Kensington Museum in London, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. The mosaics celebrated male artists through history; Whistler's two designs set out to correct the imbalance with a woman at a spindle and a Japanese woman painting a fan. In this pastel study she pauses, brush raised, to look at the fan, a sharp diagonal line rising above the orange butterfly. The commission was never carried out, and this study is all that survives.

Cassatt and the colour print

Mary Cassatt's In the Omnibus (1890–91) belongs to a series of colour etchings she made in 1890 and 1891. Each was influenced by her study of Japanese woodblock prints, especially their flat planes of colour and domestic subject matter. A middle-class woman, her nursemaid and a child ride an omnibus through Paris: an everyday city scene, organised in clear areas of colour.

Bonnard: cropping, flatness and screens

Pierre Bonnard preferred domestic scenes and the intimacy of family life. His early lithograph Family Scene (1893) shows his sister Andrée and her baby son Jean, with Bonnard himself at the lower right, gazing at his nephew. The awkward cropping of the artist and his sister, and the flat planes of colour throughout, suggest the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Bonnard at this time.

Bonnard went further with Nursemaids' Promenade, Frieze of Carriages (1895), a scene of a nanny and her three charges spread across four panels meant to be mounted as a folding screen. He emulated the solid, flat colour of Japanese woodcuts, which he collected, and showed the screen in his first solo exhibition at the Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1896.

The Square at Evening (1899) belongs to a wider revival. By the mid-19th century lithography was used mainly for commercial work, but colour printing brought it back as an artistic medium. The museum lists several reasons: the success of posters by artists such as Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the new lighter and cheaper zinc plates, the founding of printmakers' societies and, among them, the influence of Japanese colour woodblock prints. By the 1890s colour lithography had become the favourite printmaking medium of avant-garde artists in France.

Arthur Wesley Dow: a method from Japan

In the United States the most systematic follower was the artist and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, who helped revive the colour woodcut in America at the turn of the 20th century. Impressed by the flat, simplified compositions of Japanese ukiyo-e, he abandoned Western naturalism, with its linear modelling and one-point perspective, for the basic elements of Japanese design: line, form, colour and notan, the harmonious arrangement of dark and light.

There was one important difference. In Japan the artist only made the drawing, and craftsmen did the carving and printing; Dow did everything himself. Like Japanese printmakers, though, he printed by hand on mulberry paper. His subjects were the fishing village of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and the salt marshes around it, and in Dragon and Orchard (c. 1908) he changed the colours from impression to impression to capture shifting light and atmosphere, so that each print is unique.

The Derelict, or the Lost Boat (1916), an abandoned rowboat, comes from the same admiration for the flattened style of Japanese prints. Dow taught his students to study line, colour and form rather than copy nature directly, and he experimented with inking the block in different colour combinations, often producing virtually unique impressions.