Starting in the 16th century, trade with Asia exposed Europeans to new objects, techniques, and artistic expressions. Most of the early trading took place with China and South Asia as Japan was a closed society, limiting exposure to Japanese design. This remained the case until 1854 when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry led a fleet into Japanese ports, demanding an end to Japan's self-imposed isolation and securing a treaty that opened the country to the West. The exports that subsequently arrived and were exhibited in the West caused American and European designers to engage in an inspired dialogue with Japanese aesthetics. The first of a number of international expositions that showcased Asian art and design was the 1862 International Exhibition in London, followed by the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 and the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Asian metalwork, ivories, lacquerwork, woodblock prints, and textiles provided inspiration with their wealth of distinctive decorative elements, many drawn from nature, including chrysanthemums, bamboo, fans, cranes, and more. As part of a broader interest in "exotic" cultures during the late 19th century, the inspiration of newly available Japanese design sources was soon joined by those of India to help create a European and American Aesthetic Movement. Western designers exhibited an awareness of Eastern art and design through form, pattern, technique, and their choice of materials. The sophisticated New York furniture firm Herter Brothers produced pieces indebted to the rectilinearity of Asian furniture with inlay in motifs such as sunflowers, celebrated in Asian art. Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, Ohio hired Japanese artists who decorated vase forms with asymmetrical floral arrangements. The British designers Christopher Dresser and Walter Crane travelled to Japan and experienced native arts and crafts firsthand. Lockwood de Forest, the designer of this 1902 room, had a decorating business, best known for its love of Indian design, but which also incorporated Japanese ceramics and objects even before de Forest visited Japan in 1913.
This box displays the Japanese Shibayama technique by which pieces of ivory and mother-of-pearl are inlaid into a gold lacquer ground so they stand out in high relief. Traditionally Japanese lacquerware has rounded corners, intended to avoid sharp disruption of the medium’s surface finish.
This vase depicts flying cranes, the Japanese symbol for longevity.
Under Shirayamadani’s guidance, foliate motifs grew around Rookwood’s ceramic forms, encircling their surfaces balanced by shaded areas of ground to provide contrast. A sketch for a group of trumpet flowers on the upper left portion of this vase’s body shows an unfinished design composition in process.
Images of bamboo appeared on Chinese export wallpapers in the seventeenth century which inspired Western manufacturers to use bamboo motifs to instill an Asian aesthetic in their designs. This design pushes the Japanese aesthetic with bamboo medallions enframing a female figure clothed in a traditional Japanese kimono. The medallions alternate with landscape views containing a bird and cricket.
Exhibited by Tiffany & Co. at the Paris International Exposition of 1889, this vase represents a rare example of the mokumé technique of mixing metals to look like marbling or wood graining. Developed centuries before in Japan, this difficult technique was mastered by metalsmiths at Tiffany & Co. for use in decorative tablewares.
This lamp, given to the collection by Andrew and Louise Carnegie’s only child, Margaret Carnegie Miller, was used in the family’s Skibo Castle in Scotland. The shade of oversized dragonflies, one of Tiffany’s most popular motifs, was designed by Clara Driscoll, head of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department. The lamp has always been wired for electricity, a technology Carnegie eagerly embraced.
Tiffany & Co.’s artistic director Edward C. Moore owned Japanese objects including sword guards with mixed metals and hammered surfaces that he reproduced. Moore also gained knowledge about Japanese design from those objects that Christopher Dresser shipped from Japan to Louis Comfort Tiffany as a study collection in 1877. This matchsafe displays Japanese-inspired mixed metals and has a beetle as its lid lift.
In the late 19th century the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn was home to at least a dozen major ceramics firms including the Faience Manufacturing Company. This plate exhibits two signatures of the firm’s production: raised gold paste decoration and a dark blue background. This piece’s octagonal form with a band along the rim and the attenuated floral decorations recall Japanese aesthetics.
Minton’s Art Pottery Studio was established in Kensington Gore, London, where Christopher Dresser and other notable Aesthetic Movement artists painted Mintons’ pottery and tiles by hand. Dresser served as an advisor to Minton & Co./Mintons from the early 1860s by which time the factory’s design studio possessed books of Japanese prints of flowers and birds.
The composition of this tile directly relates to a Japanese blue and white ceramic flowerpot that was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, showing the explicit influence of Japanese wares on Mintons’ production, an alliance that was reinforced with Dresser’s input. The Mintons factory archive holds two designs of flying cranes signed by Dresser.
The Service Rousseau is one of the earliest expressions of Japonism in French decorative arts. The decoration was inspired in part by Katsushika Hokusai’s woodcuts that Bracquemond first saw in the workshop of a Paris printer in the mid-1850s. The service was first exhibited to great acclaim at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris and shown at world’s fairs in Paris, Vienna and London in the years following its production.
These butter pats show how Japonism influenced even the most everyday wares.
These butter pats show how Japonism influenced even the most everyday wares.
Chinese and Japanese silver was made for export to the Western market, an earlier tradition dating to the 17th century that resumed in the mid-19th century. The dragon was featured on all types of forms, such as these brushes from a toilet set, coffee pots with dragon spouts, and bowls with dragon handles.
These knives by Gorham take the forms of Japanese swords with decorated handles. One shows stylized foliate decoration while the other shows a dove perched on a branch. Along with Tiffany and Co. and the Whiting Manufacturing Company, Gorham was one of the most prevalent American adaptors of the motifs and forms of Japanese metalwork.
These ceramic objects are examples of the types of aesthetically sophisticated wares available to those with a modest income. All feature elements of Japanese design vocabulary: cranes, flowering branches, fans, mountainous landscapes, arabesque patterns, medallions, cross-hatched decoration, waves, an asymmetrical arrangement, and more.
These ceramic objects are examples of the types of aesthetically sophisticated wares available to those with a modest income. All feature elements of Japanese design vocabulary: cranes, flowering branches, fans, mountainous landscapes, arabesque patterns, medallions, cross-hatched decoration, waves, an asymmetrical arrangement, and more.
These ceramic objects are examples of the types of aesthetically sophisticated wares available to those with a modest income. All feature elements of Japanese design vocabulary: cranes, flowering branches, fans, mountainous landscapes, arabesque patterns, medallions, cross-hatched decoration, waves, an asymmetrical arrangement, and more.
The Old Hall Earthenware Company specialized in artistic designs for transfer-printed decoration onto earthenware and attracted the collaboration of the commercially minded Christopher Dresser. The abstraction, asymmetry, and medallions here show Japanese inspiration in motif and composition.
These ceramic objects are examples of the types of aesthetically sophisticated wares available to those with a modest income. All feature elements of Japanese design vocabulary: cranes, flowering branches, fans, mountainous landscapes, arabesque patterns, medallions, cross-hatched decoration, waves, an asymmetrical arrangement, and more.
In 1872 Dresser registered with Mintons a pattern of flying cranes in the form of a circle, presumably for a plate. This large platter likely derives from this pattern and is one of a number of pieces that Mintons produced featuring this popular Japanese imagery.
The Japanese influence is apparent in the asymmetrical arrangement of medallions, the unusual stylization of motifs, and the decorative ceramic vases. The unusual placement of the oddly shaped medallions is rather awkward, while the central landscape vignette restores a sense of balance. The use of the peacock, large potted flowers, and the ocher and metallic gold colors, are popular Aesthetic Movement elements.
This chair was originally made for the Mark Hopkins House in Nob Hill in San Francisco. A similar chair was designed for the Red Room of the White House in 1875, which demonstrates that Herter Brothers had adopted Japonism prior to 1876, when the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia brought Japanese design to a broader audience. There is a distinct similarity between the side chair pictured at left in Godwin’s Art furniture and the Mark Hopkins House side chair nearby.
The late 19th century saw an outpouring of new interest in an ancient media: ceramics. Imported Asian porcelains were widely admired, and many manufacturers competed by creating designs that borrowed Japanese motifs. This design for a jardinière made by Vieillard & Cie. combines an iconic blue and white diaper-patterned ground with naturalistic plum blossoms. The imitative tortoiseshell mount and gourd-shaped feet also echo motifs popular in Japanese porcelain.
This textile design’s gold tones, stylized leaves, and blooming flowers create a flat and shallow surface, a defining quality of Aesthetic Movement ornament influenced by the mania for Japanese woodblock prints and other Edo exports. In the late 19th century, Warner and Sons was a leading weaver of furnishing silk. This design for an interior fabric would have been executed in metallic threads, which, when met with light, would further contribute to its emphasis on surface ornament.
The dragon was one of Nichols’s favorite motifs. In Japanese culture dragons control the natural elements. Nichols’s treatment of birds and cattails on the vase’s body suggests their derivation from a Japanese print source, a number of which Nichols owned and had access to through their American circulation.
The ceramicist Kataro Shirayamadani participated in the "Japanese Village," a company of Japanese craftsmen who toured America demonstrating their trades in the mid-1880s. In 1887 a dealer of Asian art in Boston brought Shirayamadani to the attention of Rookwood Pottery’s founder Maria Longworth Nichols who immediately hired him.
Carved designs were seldom produced at Rookwood, making this vase a rare example.
Both the Mark Hopkins House Side Chair and this bookcase include marquetry motifs derived from sunflowers, a popular flower in Japan and a favorite symbol of both the British Aesthetic Movement and Herter Brothers. The bookcase shows the influence of the English Reform Movement architect Bruce Talbert in its ornamentation and intentionally chaste rectilinear form.
This refined rocking chair was designed by the architects Charles and Henry Greene for the Pratt House built in the foothills above Ojai, California. Greene and Greene’s signature use of Asian elements can be identified in the square ebony pegs, "cloud lift" apron, and wave-like voids in the slats evocative of the riverbed that wound around the property and gave the house its name of "Casa Barranca" (house of the ravine).
Albert R. Valentien joined the Rookwood Pottery at age 19 and served for 24 years, becoming the firm’s head decorator. This pale peach palette was one found on glass of the period, but rare for Rookwood pottery. This vase of unusually large size was part of a limited production of pastel-colored Cameo wares that were particularly suited to delicate floral motifs.
At least four Tiffany lamps as well as a Turtleback tile chandelier originally lit the Teak Room, as can be seen in the photo to the left. Turtleback was the name of Tiffany Studios’ rectangular glass tiles featured on the chandelier and the inkwell box nearby. The chandelier’s Moorish-inspired cap lent a note of exoticism that complemented the overall scheme of the room.
This object is currently on display in room 213 in Carnegie Mansion.
This fan melds two Japanese import crazes of the Aesthetic Movement—fans, which were used in both fashion and interior decoration, and ceramics—through its printed pattern of overlapping plates with motifs of cranes, peonies, and lotus blossoms. The W.T. Copeland and Sons plate [06] nearby, whose scalloped rim suggests the curves of lotus petals, depicts fans in its central pattern.
E.W. Godwin incorporated a wide range of influences in his development of "art furniture": Jacobean, Gothic, ancient Greek, as well as Chinese and Japanese culture. Twelve plates from this volume were reproduced in 1878 in the American periodical the Art-Worker, leading to the start of his strong following by American architects, decorators, and designers, including architect Henry Hobson Richardson. The bands of stylized chrysanthemums and other motifs seen here relate to the decoration on the ceramics inside the Herter Brothers bookcase nearby.
Dominick and Haff, whose output and originality competed with Tiffany & Co. and Gorham in its day, also embraced Japanese aesthetics. A dense pattern of vines, leaves, berries, and butterflies in high relief envelops this tea service. Each piece of the set takes the basic form of a cube which is a geometry drawn from Japanese examples.