Buhot and Japonisme
As Japan reopened its ports for trade with the West in the mid-1850s, various objects from this foreign country arrived in Europe and North America. French avant-garde artists and writers were among the very first to foster a taste for Japanese art and culture, soon to be known as japonisme. Many became fascinated with the exoticism of Japanese objects and the stylistic and thematic novelties of Japanese woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e.
The sympathy of these early Japan aficionados and collectors toward artistic newness, stemming from their interest in finding and articulating modernity in art, aligned them with another recent new phenomenon in the art world: the rediscovery of etching as an artistic medium. Félix Bracquemond, often mythologized as the pioneering japoniste in France who “discovered” Katsushika Hokusai’s Manga (a collection of the artist’s drawings published in fifteen volumes between 1814 and 1878), was a founding member of the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers; 1862–67). Philippe Burty, the de facto spokesperson of the French etching revival who coined the term japonisme, quickly amassed a significant collection of East Asian art that provided a model for public and private exhibitions of Japanese art throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Many avant-garde artists, among them Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and the American Mary Cassatt, showed interest in both etching and Japanese art throughout their careers.
From the start of his career as a printmaker, Félix Buhot expressed interest in Japanese art and japonisme. By the mid-1870s, he was producing commercial designs for Parisian shops specializing in “Oriental” goods and showing works featuring Japanese motifs. Through his friendships with Bracquemond and Burty, he had access to some of the most significant collections of Japanese objects in Paris. In 1875, Buhot made several etchings designed after Japanese objects in Burty’s collection. These were later compiled and published in 1883 under the title Japonisme. This effort coincided with a major retrospective of Japanese art at the Gallery Georges Petit in Paris organized by Louis Gonse, a leading Japanese art scholar who was then the director of the prestigious journal Gazette des beaux-arts.
Burty later acclaimed Buhot’s Japonisme etchings as executed “in a manner of which [the artist] may still be proud. … Japanism … has never had a more intelligent or exact interpreter." [Philippe Burty, “Félix Buhot, Painter and Etcher,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 76 (February 1888), 333–34.]
Barque de Dai-Ko-Ku, Bois, 1874
Daikoku’s Treasure Boat, published in Japonismein 1883
Described by Buhot as a facsimile of a Japanese woodblock print owned by Philippe Burty, this print depicts a takarabune, a treasure ship in Japanese folklore that was sailed by Daikoku, the god of prosperity and good fortune, to numerous ports during the first three days of the new year. Woodblock prints of takarabune played an important role in the traditional Japanese new year celebration. Placing them under one’s pillow on the second night of the new year was believed to bring auspicious dreams and a fortunate year. For Western collectors of Japanese art such as Buhot and Burty, the image of a Japanese treasure ship would have had a more literal meaning, recalling ships arriving in French ports, loaded with treasures from a faraway land.
Papillon et libellule, 1874
Butterfly and Dragonfly, published in Japonismein 1883
In the print to the right, a dragonfly and a butterfly hover around lotus blossoms and leaves. Depicting insects and flowers, a popular motif in Japanese arts, in an ambiguous space, Buhot here deploys japonisme as both a thematic inspiration and a means of stylistic experimentation. The print was intended as both an independent image and as a design to decorate the back cover of the Japonisme portfolio, published in 1883. The impressions printed apart from the portfolio were mostly printed in blue or lavender. This impression, in black, is from the portfolio cover.
Baptême japonaise, 1887
Baptism in Japanese Style
In this complex work, Buhot celebrates his one-year-old son, Jean, whose portrait appears in the oval medallion. Surrounding the medallion are seemingly random pictorial motifs in multiple spaces seamlessly merged. We see paper lanterns, an open folding fan, East Asian vases, incense sticks, squatting Japanese figures—reminiscent of figure studies in Katsushika Hokusai’s Manga (1814–78)—vegetal and animal motifs, and tonal experiments quoting Japanese visual arts. On a tree branch sit two owls, birds that frequented Buhot’s oeuvre as both pictorial themes and personal emblem (the word owl in Spanish—búho—sounds like his name). Here, Buhot compiles various interests in his life to commemorate his fantasy-like world and the slippery borderlines between his art, imagination, and life.
Le Château des hiboux, 1887
The Owls’ Castle
and
Ex-libris de Léon Lerey, 1877–78
Bookplate for Léon Lerey
Buhot began this print in 1877 on the right side of the composition as a bookplate for the Parisian bookseller Leon Leroy. For some reason, he never completed it; only a few proof impressions were pulled. Ten years later, Buhot revisited the plate, drew the owl’s castle to the left, and incorporated both images into a single design. The motif of the owl, the artist’s alter-ego, occurs throughout Buhot’s work. He derived the more unusual notion of combining circular and rectangular forms from Japanese woodblock prints.