Before we can discuss the influence of Japanese prints on Bonnard’s art, we must first examine the broader context of the Japanese art craze in Paris, dubbed Japonisme in 1872 by the French art critic, collector, and printmaker Phillippe Burty. Japan began to actively export art in 1859, when its ports were opened by the American Commodore Matthew Perry, and by the turn of the century, Japanese objets d’art could be found in curiosity shops all over Paris (Floyd). No fashionable salon was complete without some assemblage of kimonos, fans, woodcuts, or other Asiatic bric-a-brac. Collections of Japanese art were formed, and the first French museum to be devoted to Asian art and religion was founded in the 1880s (Gliem 3). The genre of the woodblock print had been developed in Japan as a means of dispersing art to the masses, as it was cheap and relatively simple to mass produce. They were introduced to Paris in an unexpected manner: as packing material in crates of fine Asian China (Tour). Artists throughout the city, like Van Gogh and Gauguin, were impressed by the bright colors, calligraphic lines, and simple joys of these prints and began to snap them up. Evidence of the assimilation of Japanese compositional techniques into European art can be found in much of the art created at the end of the nineteenth century, from advertisements to fine oil paintings.
It was in the midst of this cultural mélange that Bonnard began his career as an artist. He had struggled to create an identity for himself as an artist until one fateful day in the spring of 1890, when Siegfried Bing launched an exhibition on the history of the Japanese woodblock print at the École des Beaux-Arts (Petrucchi-Petri). It was this exposure to Japanese prints, not his later move to the South, that inspired Bonnard to develop the unique colorist style that would earn him the wide recognition in the art world that he so deserved. These 700 prints from private Parisian collections so enthralled Bonnard that he began a collection of his own. He described this excitement in his own words as follows:
In a department store, for a few pennies, I found some [printed] crepe paper or crinkled rice paper in stunning colors. I covered the walls of my room with this bright, naïve imagery… these things that I had there in front of me were extremely skillful and lively. (Bonnard, qtd. Petrucchi-Petri 190)
In this passage from a letter that he wrote to his friend Gaston Diehl, Bonnard shows that by surrendering his walls to these most basic expressions of Japanese art, he allowed himself to be immersed in their influence. With this statement, Bonnard demonstrates that he was not initially drawn to the more subdued, traditional work of Japanese masters, but to the bright colors of the popular prints in the Ukiyo-e genre, depictions of the mythical Japanese “floating world” centered on the city Edo’s pleasure quarter and the women that inhabited it (Petrucchi-Petri 190). Paradoxically, this fleeting experience was represented in the woodblock prints by solid blocks of bright color and bold calligraphic lines. (Hyman 14). Many of the Ukiyo-e prints depicted geisha going about simple, everyday tasks like bathing, combing their hair, and socializing, always dressed in loud prints and depicted in striking colors. Bonnard was particularly intrigued by these feminine subjects, and began to paint many solitary women himself.