Hi everyone! Today I’ll be talking about the Japonisme movement and the 1867 Paris World’s Fair as my international topic of choice!

The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) was the second World’s Fair hosted by the Second French Empire of Napoleon the Third and brought together roughly 50,000 exhibitors from approximately 32 countries and attracted roughly 11 million visitors over its 8-month duration. It was organized by economist Michel Chevalier and engineer Frédéric Le Play, and it sought to cover “everything everywhere”. Before the 1850s, Japan was extremely self-isolated, but with the opening of the ports, the country was opened to the West, and the West was opened to them. At the London World’s Fair in 1862, hundreds of Japanese decorative objects were presented and sold by the British Ambassador to Japan, Sir Rutherford Alcock. However, the 1867 Paris World’s Fair was the first in which Japan officially participated. At this fair, Japan was represented by a Japanese house and in the Pavillon de Satsuma in the Parc des Nations in the Champ-de-Mars around the Palais de l’Industrie. The introduction of Japanese art during this period led to a movement known as Japonisme.

The term Japonisme was coined by a French writer and art collector, Philippe Burty, in 1872; he used the word to describe “a new field of study of artistic, historic, and ethnographic borrowings from the arts of Japan”. It was a fascination that was not strictly limited to France either; it was widespread across America, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany (where it was called Japanismus). Followers of this movement were particularly enticed by ukiyo-e prints, meaning “pictures of the floating world.” This school of art recorded the life, fashions, and entertainments of the Japanese urban and affluent people in the 17th through early 19th centuries. These prints depicted a world that the West had never known due to the intense isolation of the Tokugawa shoguns (1603-1867), who captured the imagination and admiration of Westerners.

Works cited

Brunet, François, and Jessica Talley. “Exhibiting the West at the Paris Exposition of 1867: Towards a New American Aesthetic Identity?” Transatlantica 2 (2017): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.11280. 
Demeulenaere-Douyère, Christiane. “Japan at the World’s Fairs: A Reflection.” Journal of Japonisme 5 (2020): 129-151. https://doi.org/10.1163/24054992-00052P01. 
Lambourne, Lionel. Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West. Phaidon Press Limited (2005).