Who Conceived the Idea of Calling this Revolution of Western Arts "Japonisme"?
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
Starting in the late 1850s, with the opening of Japan to world trade following the end of the imposed isolationism, Sakoku, Japanese objects entered Western markets in large numbers, in entire "bales."
A new visibility was revealed, overturning European aesthetics, from decoration and clothing to the fine arts. A name had to be invented for this fashion or this revolution. It was called Japonisme.
Who invented the term? How were the first critics able to grasp these curious objects, drawings, and engravings—they who were ignorant of even the culture and language in which these items had been conceived?
A Confused Paternity
Historiography has wandered somewhat… Tradition long considered the critic Jules Clarétie as the father of the designation, as he used it in 1872 in his review of the Salon. He himself, a dozen years later, attributed the invention of the term to another colleague, Ernest Chesneau.
Yet, the inventor of the term Japonisme is none other than the critic Philippe Burty; he claimed paternity in a text published in English in the summer of 1875. This publication across the Channel was, in fact, merely the adaptation of a series of articles that appeared in the spring of 1872 in La Renaissance littéraire et artistique. These writings prove that Philippe Burty, whose features were immortalised by the portraitist Étienne Carjat in 1873, not only christened the movement but also initiated the study of this influence, before a family bereavement abruptly interrupted his publishing work.
A Naturalistic Approach through the Image
Burty appeared torn between the attraction to a visual culture and the inability to grasp its linguistic codes. He attempted a few Japanese lessons; his presence is noted at the lectures of Léon de Rosny at the Collège de France, but he remained totally inept in Japanese phonetics and writing.
In such a manner, being unable to decipher the slightest inscription accompanying the engravings, he adopted a strictly visual and empirical posture, compensating for his ignorance of the texts through a method of observation that he compared to that of a naturalist researcher.
Instead of reading the works, he scrutinised and analysed Japanese forms—particularly those of the master Hokusai—based on European aesthetic criteria.
The critic thus approached the art of the Japanese through the exclusive prism of its plasticity, independently of any literary or cultural significance.
The Anchoring of the Term
The widely repeated term became institutionalised, entering the pages of Pierre Larousse's dictionary as early as 1878 and Jules Adeline's dictionary of artistic terms in the mid-1880s. People would speak of Japonisme or Japonism, Japonismus in German, in English…
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