Manette Salomon

Katsushika_Hokusai__Goten_yama_hill__Shinagawa_on_the_T_kaid__ca._1832.jpg

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, an inseparable fraternal duo, “claim to have originated japonisme in France.”[1] In their novel Manette Salomon, which appeared in 1867, they dedicate a chapter to contrasting gloomy, grey Paris with the technicolor world depicted in an album of Japanese woodblock prints. Looking through a book of them, the surly artist Coriolis “lost himself in that sky where the pink flowers of the trees drown, in that blue enamel clutching the snowy flowers of the peach and almond trees, in those big crimson sunsets from which rays grow, making a blood-colored wheel...”[2] This decadent passage captures the smooth and vivid prints of artists like Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro, which were perhaps the most successful Japanese artistic export of the nineteenth century.[3] The print on this page is one of Hokusai’s works and is the kind of archetypal image the Goncourt brothers evoke in the passage above. The otherworldliness of the Japanese estampe in a European context gave it the power to transport its viewer to an inconceivable place. For those like Coriolis, these prints opened up a portal into a palpably different world, a portal through which people could move at their convenience whenever they became bored of the world they were living in. The commodification of Japanese art may have been so successful because it promised a world that was too good to be true.

 

Footnotes: 

1 Hartman, Elwood. “Japonisme and Nineteenth-Century French Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, East-West Issue (Jun., 1981). Penn State UP. pp. 142. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/stable/402462 pp 156

2 De Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Manette Salomon. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1877. Print. p 173.

3 Op. cit. Hartman. pp 141

Manette Salomon