A wider world in 19th-century Europe

We often think of Europe, Africa, and the other continents as self-contained units, but another way to think about these places is as sites on the edges of oceans linked together internally by canals, roads, and rail that carried people from one place to another. Among the forces that shaped Europe in the nineteenth century was transportation linking people and products throughout the world. 

Women like Laure, depicted in Manet’s Olympia bearing a bouquet of flowers in her role as the maid, may have arrived at the great harbor at Le Hâvre on a sailing ship from the Caribbean. Arrivals in that northern port might have found their way to Paris by train, disembarking at the Gare Saint-Lazare Station. 

It was clear early on that the steam engine and railway would fundamentally change life in Europe and beyond. The English painter, J.M.W. Turner, addressed the new technology in Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway and Claude Monet explored the visual impact of the modern train station in The Saint-Lazare Station. 

In the nineteenth century, European artists responded enthusiastically to new works of art that came their way as a consequence of trade: primarily Japanese woodblock prints. After the establishment of Japanese ports for Western trading vessels in 1853 (the so-called “opening of Japan” after centuries of closed borders), Japanese goods—particularly porcelain and raw silk—made their way to European markets. As the essay below about Japonisme explains, woodblock prints that first arrived in shipping crates as packing material for porcelain had a profound impact on European art and design.

Édouard Manet’s portrait of the writer and critic, Émile Zola, clearly expresses the significance of the interaction between Western European and Japanese culture. Created as a means to thank Zola for his early support, Manet surrounded the writer with objects that reflected his tastes and his world. Next to his desk, cluttered with books and papers, is a Japanese screen. Above Zola’s desk we find a bulletin board with a print of European paintings, such as Manet’s Olympia and Velázquez’s Los Borrachos, along with a colorful Japanese woodblock print depicting a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II.

While Manet directly addressed Japanese art in his portrait of Zola, other artists, including the Impressionists, incorporated aspects of the Japanese approach in their work. Edgar Degas showed Parisian dancers attending a ballet class, comparable to the images of urban entertainers found in Japanese images of the “floating world,” shown using an elevated vantage point and elongated composition.

In his striking painting, The Floor Scrapers (Les raboteurs de parquet), Gustave Caillebotte used a similar vantage point that helped him to emphasize the flat pattern of the lines on the floor which contrasted with the curvilinear forms of the iron balcony railing, reminiscent of Japanese prints as well.

Claude Monet’s painting of The Argenteuil Bridge is another good reminder of how Japanese prints affected subject matter and depictions. Monet collected hundreds of woodblock prints and displayed them throughout his home at Giverny, also the site of his famous gardens and Japanese-style footbridge. Among the prints he owned was Utagawa Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake from his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series that may have played a role in Monet’s interest in the bridges of the Seine.

While Monet and the others offered views of public life, artists also used this new approach for more intimate images of private life, as their Japanese counterparts did as well. After she saw an exhibition of Japanese prints in 1890, the American expatriate painter and printmaker, Mary Cassatt, incorporated bold patterning, unusual points of view, and a radical flattening out of her compositions, such as we see in The Child’s Bath.

As artists responded to the innovations of the Impressionists, some, like the Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, returned to what they viewed as a more disciplined and rigorous approach to painting.

Other painters, like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, turned to approaches and subjects outside of the Western European world as a means to express themselves. While the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists found subject matter in the social life in and around cities like Paris, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin turned inward to fix their own emotions, dreams, and visions of a different world on canvas. In pursuit of this goal, Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin and other artists turned away from the styles of art that dominated in Paris. Vincent van Gogh left Paris for the south of France, settling in Arles where Gauguin briefly joined him, to create more directly expressive paintings—turning to Japanese woodblock prints for inspiration. Artists, like Gauguin, also lived and worked in Brittany, a province in Northern France, as well as places far from Europe such as Martinique, in the French Caribbean, and Tahiti, in French Polynesia.

Vincent van Gogh

The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh began his career immersed in a style that he associated with the Realist approach of Jean-François Millet. We can see this in his early painting The Potato Eaters with its depiction of working-class life in hues of grey, muddy green, and brown.

He would move on from there through an Impressionist phase after moving to Paris where he began to collect Japanese prints with his brother, Theo. Vincent remained in Paris for two years, but then left for the south of France in 1888. During that first year, he wrote to Theo from Arles (where Van Gogh moved after a period in Paris), “[a]ll my work is based to some extent on Japanese art,” and for Vincent the south of France was his equivalent of Japan. He viewed it, and Japan, as more “primitive” regions. While few would use the term “primitive” today, for someone like Vincent it meant a world unaffected by the rules and restrictions of Western European cities. During this period, he began to focus more closely on incorporating Asian traditions of design into his paintings. 

In a letter to his brother about the Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, Vincent metaphorically embedded himself in the world of Japan by depicting himself with a shaved head and simple clothing that recalled Buddhist monks, and tried to physically embody a Japanese artist in the self-portrait.

In Vincent’s art, we find the Japanese tradition, as he understood it, powerfully expressed in The Starry Night where vibrant areas of color dominate, presented with bold outlines, that replace a focus on depth with an overall flat design of swirling colors.

Gauguin—seeking the self in the “other”

Vincent invited Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles, in the south of France, in part because Gauguin had already sought a retreat from the complexity of modern city life. In Arles, the two artists hoped to find a simpler way of living that did not embrace the social norms, increasing technology, and cultural sophistication of Paris—in other words, they pursued  a more or less Western fantasy of a more “natural” or “primitive” world. 

With the painter Charles Laval, Gauguin had already visited the French colonial island Martinique—where women like the model Laure had their roots—in 1887.  Gauguin soon returned to France, when he spent time in rural Pont Aven in Brittany, early in 1888. There he created Vision After the Sermon with a design taken from Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock print, Plum Garden at Kameido Shrine.

After spending nine turbulent weeks with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin left the south of France and, two years later, left France altogether for a second time. In 1891, he travelled to another overseas French possession, Tahiti, and stayed for two years. 

Art historians work hard to interpret Gauguin’s paintings from this period because they are important to the history of Western European art in the nineteenth century, beautiful to look at, and yet troubling to those who interpret the images’ clear indications of the dominant position of European men in European colonies and other territorial possessions. Essays linked below explore the complex issues presented by Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings.

Not all artists left home in search of new experiences and environments. Some, like Paul Cézanne, returned to their birthplaces. There Cézanne questioned how even the simplest objects are represented in space and time on the flat plane of the canvas. His groundbreaking work is The Basket of Apples.

While a basket of apples does not transport the viewer to new places and encounters with the people there, it is a journey of another kind deep into the nature of representational art itself. 

There is no question that the art of Japan and the cultures of the Caribbean and Pacific cultures had an enduring impact on European art in the nineteenth century, but it is important to remember that these “influences” were the result of points of contact between people and not just cultures. John Constable and Ford Madox Brown witnessed people forced to leave their homes to search for work and a better life. Edouard Manet had Laure’s address in his notebooks, and Gauguin traveled the world. Artists like Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne lay the groundwork for new types of European art, like Fauvism and Cubism, in the twentieth century.