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L’Art Japonais was published in two volumes in 1883, by a French art critic, Louis Gonse (1846-1921). In 1891, this book was translated into English and published in the United States. Thereafter, it was re-edited and reprinted for several times. The chapters of L’Art Japonais are arranged by various types of art mediums, including “Painting,” “Architecture,” “Sculpture,” “Lacquer,” “Tissues,” etc. With more than one thousand of illustrations, it was regarded as the first book about Japanese art history available in the West. L’Art Japonais was written during the phenomenon known as Japonisme. Among many beloved Japanese art types at the time, the most popular was Ukiyo-e, which was revealed to be Gonse’s obsession. In addition, different ways of seeing Japanese art were observed in the book along with the revelation of multiple resources related to art in Japan that were previously unknown.
In the late nineteenth-century Europe, Japanese painting attracted minimal recognitions and interests. Gonse brought attention to the value of Japanese painting, and depicted a more diverse and comprehensive history of it. It was the first of its kind in scale and in content. Some of his evaluations were subsequently adopted by the Japanese. This thesis mainly focuses on the “Painting” chapter in L’Art Japoanis. The first chapter outlines the career of Louis Gonse and investigates other publications of the same genre between 1873 to 1883. Its intention is to explore the general understanding of Japanese art in the west at that time. The second chapter addresses the contents of the “Painting” chapter, including the parts of “Ukioy-e,” “Kano school” and “Rin school,” and analyzes the way Gonse appreciated and wrote about Japanese painting. The last chapter examines the illustrations in the “Painting” chapter and investigates the sources of the images as well as the text-image relations. Through the analysis of texts and images, this thesis attempts to recover the history of Japanese painting as it was understood by the late nineteenth-century French, and to comprehend Gonse’s contributions and the limitations he faced at the time. | en_US |