Monet’s Love Affair with Japanese Art

One day in 1871, legend has it, a French artist named Claude Monet walked into a food shop in Amsterdam, where he had gone to escape the Prussian siege of Paris. There he spotted some Japanese prints being used as wrapping paper. He was so taken by the engravings that he bought one on the spot. The purchase changed his life — and the history of Western art.

Monet went on to collect 231 Japanese prints, which greatly influenced his work and that of other practitioners of Impressionism, the movement he helped create. Under the new Meiji Emperor, Japan in the 1870s was just opening to the outside world after centuries of isolation. Japanese handicrafts were flooding into European department stores and art galleries. Japonisme, a fascination with all things Japanese, was soon the rage among French intellectuals and artists, among them Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and the young Monet. Perhaps for that reason Impressionism caught on early in Japan and remains ferociously popular there.

But the 231 prints that helped forge that mutual infatuation have long been out of sight. For decades they graced the walls of Monet’s home at Giverny, an hour outside of Paris. In the years after his death in 1926, the delicate, light-sensitive engravings were largely replaced with copies. Now the originals can be seen again, until Feb. 25, in “Claude Monet’s Japanese Prints” at Paris’ Marmottan Monet Museum.

As a collector, Monet had a sharp eye. Though he never went to Japan, he befriended writers, curators and art dealers who did, and they steered him toward quality. His treasures, all hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e — “images of the floating world” of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well as images of Westerners relaxing in Yokohama, the port city that became the focus of Japanese contact with the West. Monet had several of Hiroshige’s scenes from the classic Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, plus the lively, almost offhand sketches of animals and ordinary folk by Ogata Korin.

Oddly, the Marmottan has not put any of Monet’s Japanese prints side by side with his paintings to show the influences, even though this relatively small museum has one of the world’s most important collections of his works. But if you’re wondering how the prints inspired him, you need only descend one floor to the museum’s main holdings. There you will see why Monet is hailed as one of art’s more inventive geniuses. But you may have to look closely to discern how Japan made him that way.

Monet was not shy about his fascination with the country and its art. In 1876, five years after that encounter in the food shop, he painted La Japonaise, depicting his first wife Camille in a kimono against a background decorated with uchiwa (Japanese paper fans). At Giverny, where he moved in 1883 at age 42, he built a Japanese bridge over a Japanese pond in a Japanese garden, and he spent the rest of his life painting that private paradise — and especially its water lilies. But like the tale of the food shop, the reality of how Japan influenced Monet is elusive, subtle and obscured by embellishment.Monet worked in the Netherlands not just in 1871, but again in 1874 and 1886, and biographers offer wildly varying accounts of that first, life-altering Japanese print he bought: it was in Amsterdam, or Delft or Zaandam; at a food shop or a porcelain store; it was being used as wrapping paper or hanging on a wall. Monet himself recalled: “My true discovery of Japan, the purchase of my first prints, dates from 1856. I was 16. I spotted them at Le Havre, in a shop that dealt in curiosities brought back by foreign travelers.” But even here the timing is suspect, improbably soon after Japan’s opening to the West.

More rewarding is to speculate about how art opened Monet to Japan. Printmaking is a more cumbersome and less forgiving process than painting, so Japanese artists developed a remarkable economy of expression. Utamaro, for instance, could with a mere line or two describe the course of a river or the fullness of a women’s breast. Thus could Monet — in Impression, Sunrise (1873), the painting that gave Impressionism its name — conjure up a boat with a mere squiggle of the brush.

Monet also shared his Japanese predecessors’ fascination with nature and informal scenes of everyday life: compare Monet’s two girls at the beach in Les Cousines (1870), downstairs at the Marmottan, to Utagawa Toyokuni’s Three Women on a Boat Lamparo Fishing (before 1825), upstairs. Monet’s snowscapes, like those he did of Argenteuil, are indirect descendants of the snowy fields and mountains of Hiroshige and Hokusai. The unconventional, asymmetric “snapshot” composition favored by ukiyo-e artists became a hallmark of Impressionism: a good example is the Marmottan’s La Barque (1887), in which Monet places the barque, or boat, at the edge of a mostly empty canvas. Hokusai’s powerful (and famous) The Great Wave Off the Coast at Kanagawa (ca. 1831-33) is an aqueous cousin of the waves Monet splashed against the rocky coasts of Normandy and Brittany. And while Monet captured the changing light on the façade of Rouen’s cathedral in more than 30 paintings, Hokusai rendered Mount Fuji at least 36 times, at all hours and in every season.

Perhaps the greatest gift Japan gave Monet, and Impressionism, was an incandescent obsession with getting the play of light and shadow, the balance of colors and the curve of a line, just right — not the way it is in reality, but the way it looks in the artist’s imagination. “I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better,” Hokusai wrote 16 years before his death at age 89. “At 90, I hope to have caught the very essence of things, so that at 100 I will have reached heavenly mysteries. At 110, every point and line will be living.” Monet spent the last decades of his life painting his water lilies, and then painting them again, until he lost his sight in quest of an elusive, transcendent perfection that might best be called Japanese.