Madame Desoye and Japonisme: The Overlooked Influence of a Parisian Merchant
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
In the Paris of the Second Empire, during the early 1860s, Japonisme was born—a movement that owed much to a boutique located at 220 rue de Rivoli and brilliantly managed by Louise Desoye.
Historiography has often conflated the address and signage of the "E. Desoye" shop, a specialist in Japanese objects, with those of La Jonque Chinoise or La Porte Chinoise, which were competing establishments.
How did this merchant become the hub for an intellectual and artistic avant-garde within the patriarchal legal and cultural context of the second half of the 19th century?
The Building of Transcultural Expertise
The story begins with Émile De Soye, an orphan of Brussels origin, abandoned by his father, who became a maître d'hôtel. He left to seek his fortune in the Far East in the late 1850s. Upon his return, a consolidated inheritance allowed him to invest in the heart of Paris.
In 1863, he married Louise Chopin, a woman twenty-five years his junior. She reportedly acquired direct knowledge of Asian civilisations during Catholic missions and may have distributed quinine to populations struck by fevers.
Nicknamed "the Japanese woman" by Tout-Paris, including Champfleury, for her diaphanous complexion and vast culture, the young woman and her boutique appeared in commercial directories as early as 1863. She established herself alongside a few Japanese merchants as the specialist in Japanese objects, often called japoneries, in the "curiosities" section of the Bottin.
While Émile, her husband, travelled to restock the store or frequented Parisian auction houses to buy up Oriental lots, Louise handled the daily management and sales of the establishment.
Her expertise was recognised and appreciated; she provided information on the origins and meaning of certain imported objects. The critic Philippe Burty, the inventor of the term Japonisme, would remember being briefed on the inscriptions of prints that he himself was unable to decipher.
The Financial Emancipation of a Woman
The legal framework in force at the time hindered women's access to entrepreneurship. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 imposed financial irresponsibility on wives and deprived them of inheritance rights in most cases.
However, Louise Desoye was an exception, based on a specific clause in her marriage contract that allowed her to retain and grow her business after the death of her husband, who had been ill for several years and passed away in 1870, just as Japonisme was in full swing.
A clientele that was sometimes disrespectful, accustomed to prostitutes working under the guise of waitresses and shopgirls—described in minute detail by contemporary tourist guides—was quickly put in its place; Madame Desoye was not one of them, nor was she a courtesan. William Michael Rossetti recalled how she would expel tourists who were misinformed about her character.
James Tissot sourced items there regularly before moving to London, and some historians have wished to see the merchant posing as a model in his Japanese Woman in the Bath or Young Woman Holding Japanese Objects.
However, the presence of an obi—the traditional wide belt knotted at the front—in the first painting identifies a geisha. In the second, the young woman is undressed. These details contradict the reputed bourgeois propriety of the widow Desoye. She had nonetheless commissioned a portrait from Tissot; her account books attest to it, though the painting is unknown today.
The Respected Boutique of an Elite
The shop, much like Bing’s later on, attracted the intellectual elite of Paris and European capitals.
Edmond and Jules Goncourt proudly claimed discovery of the place, soon followed by the poet Charles Baudelaire or Frédéric Villot, curator of paintings at the Louvre Museum and later president of the Conservatoire des musées.
Impressionist painters handled fabrics, bronzes, enamels, figurines, ivories, and especially those famous richly illustrated albums, including works by Utagawa Kunisada, Hiroshige, or Hokusai, among many others.
Anticipating the exhaustion of high-quality, low-cost imports, Louise—who had remarried after imposing a contract of separation of property with a man far less wealthy than herself and seven years her junior—closed her doors around 1888 or early 1889, as the "Veuve Desoye" entry disappeared from the Didot-Bottin.
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