In 1856, a single ukiyo-e print arrived in Paris.
It had been used as packing material for a shipment of ceramics. The printmaker Félix Bracquemond noticed the paper, and what he saw stopped him: a page from Hokusai’s Manga sketchbook. He passed it around to his fellow artists — Manet, Degas, and others — and the shock of it spread slowly through the whole city.
That was how Japonisme began.
1. Japan Opens, and the Prints Cross the Sea
In 1853, Commodore Perry’s fleet arrived in Japan and forced open a country that had been closed for more than two hundred years. Japanese goods poured into world markets almost overnight.
Among them were ukiyo-e prints — reportedly used, at first, as nothing more than wrapping paper. What had been treated as disposable was, in the eyes of French artists, something else entirely. Its value reversed in an instant.
The 1867 Paris World’s Fair put Japanese art and craft on a grand stage, and the wave of Japonisme rolled forward in earnest.
2. What Van Gogh Saw
Van Gogh collected more than five hundred ukiyo-e prints in his lifetime.
What he received from them was not simply “exotic atmosphere.” It was something more fundamental: flat planes of color, bold outlines, daring compositions rooted in direct observation of nature — all the things Western painting had long avoided were simply taken for granted in ukiyo-e.
Van Gogh made oil-painting copies of two Hiroshige prints — Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Plum Estate, Kameido — not as homage, but as a method of learning: copying the entire image to absorb its technique.
His letters to his brother Theo return to ukiyo-e again and again. One passage reads: “The Japanese think in line. I want to think that way too.”
3. The Japanese Garden in Monet’s Normandy
Claude Monet collected more than two hundred ukiyo-e prints over his lifetime and covered the walls of his house in Giverny, Normandy, with them.
The Japanese bridge and water-lily pond he built in his garden were directly inspired by Hiroshige’s prints. The late series of Water Lilies that consumed the last decades of his life — that shimmering of water, that scatter of light — breathes the ukiyo-e aesthetic of painting the air itself.
The garden that gave birth to French Impressionism was shaped by Japanese woodblock prints. Art’s influences bloom in the most unexpected places.
4. Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Klimt, Debussy…
The reach of Japonisme extended well beyond Impressionism.
Edgar Degas borrowed ukiyo-e’s asymmetrical compositions and its cuts — placing figures at the edge of the frame, letting them run off the picture — in his paintings of dancers. These were radical moves by the standards of European painting at the time.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters carry the unmistakable influence of ukiyo-e’s bold outlines and flat color. His poster art is a direct ancestor of modern graphic design.
Gustav Klimt’s decorative use of gold, his flattened figures — here too, the resonances with ukiyo-e are audible.
And the influence didn’t stop with visual art. Claude Debussy is said to have kept a reproduction of The Great Wave off Kanagawa at his side while composing his orchestral work La Mer (1905). The first edition score was printed with the wave on its cover — the composer himself was announcing the connection. Ukiyo-e had reached into music.
5. The Paradox: Art That Japan Discarded
What was happening in Japan during the height of Japonisme — roughly the 1880s to 1900s?
The Meiji government, in its urgency to Westernize, had created a climate that dismissed Edo-period culture, including ukiyo-e, as old-fashioned. Vast numbers of prints were sold abroad for next to nothing, and few in Japan at the time seemed troubled by it.
The things Japan had thrown away, Europe was treating as treasure. That paradox eventually became the catalyst for Japan’s own rediscovery of ukiyo-e’s value.
Most of the ukiyo-e prints held in the world’s great museums today left Japan during this period.
I’ll be honest: writing this stirs something a little melancholy in me. Works now carefully preserved in distant museums might otherwise have rested in some storeroom somewhere in Japan. But alongside that sadness, there’s a strange pride in the fact that what Japan once let go crossed the sea and changed Western art forever. Discarded treasure — and it altered how the world sees. When I think about it that way, the paradox feels like something more than just a sad story.
A Final Thought
Japonisme was not a Japan craze.
It was the shock of an encounter — Western art, at an impasse, suddenly meeting a completely different visual language. The flatness, the empty space, the power of line that ukiyo-e brought: these opened new possibilities in Western painting.
And there is a certain irony in how the story ends: the Impressionist paintings that ukiyo-e helped to inspire are now among the Western artworks most beloved by the Japanese.
References
- Vincent van Gogh, letters to Theo (1888) — vangoghmuseum.nl
- The Van Gogh Museum, “Van Gogh and Japan” exhibition catalogue, 2018
- Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art Since 1858, Thames & Hudson, 2007
- Gabriel Weisberg ed., Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975
Image Credit
- Cover image: Left — Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1857; Right — Vincent van Gogh, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge (after Hiroshige), 1887 — Both public domain via Wikimedia Commons
