Japonisme is the term, coined in French in 1872 by the critic Philippe Burty, for the wave of European fascination with Japanese decorative art that followed the opening of Japan to Western trade in 1854. Japonisme touched painting, ceramics, textiles and graphic art profoundly, and within fine jewellery it produced a distinct school whose influence ran from the late 1860s through the Aesthetic Movement, into Art Nouveau, and on into the twentieth century. It is not a single style so much as a sustained dialogue with Japanese form, palette and craft technique.

Origins and Diffusion

The first sustained European exposure to Japanese decorative art came through the international expositions, beginning with the London International Exhibition of 1862 and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, at which the Japanese pavilions presented lacquer, sword fittings, ceramics and prints to a Western audience for the first time at scale. By the late 1860s the Parisian dealer Siegfried Bing was importing Japanese prints and decorative objects, and his shop and journal Le Japon Artistique became a pivotal channel for the new taste. Bing later named his Paris gallery Maison de l'Art Nouveau, and the same dealer who had introduced Hokusai to the West also gave Art Nouveau its name; the genealogical link between Japonisme and the new style was direct.

Sources within Japanese Decorative Art

The single most influential body of work for jewellers was the metalwork of the Edo-period sword-fittings tradition. The patinated alloys shakudo and shibuichi, the techniques of nunome-zogan flat inlay, takazogan high-relief inlay, mokume-gane wood-grain lamination and katakiribori chiselled engraving, gave Western makers a vocabulary of dark-metal, mixed-metal effects that European fine jewellery had never explored. Lucien Falize, Tiffany & Co. under Edward C. Moore, and a number of British and American makers all studied these techniques in earnest, sometimes employing Japanese craftsmen and sometimes reverse-engineering the metallurgy.

Japanese ornament was also a deep well of motif. Asymmetric cherry-blossom branches, chrysanthemums, irises, prunus, bamboo, dragonflies, carp, tortoises, cranes and the rolling waves of Hokusai's prints all entered the jeweller's repertoire. The Japanese preference for asymmetry and for the negative space of an empty ground was perhaps the deepest borrowing, since it broke decisively with the centred, symmetrical Western tradition.

Principal Makers

In Paris, the firm of Lucien Falize and his son Andre Falize produced enamelled cloisonné jewellery from the late 1860s drawing directly on Japanese sources, including the celebrated series of articulated bracelets in cloisonné enamel after Japanese embroidered models. The Maison Boucheron under Frederic Boucheron incorporated Japanese motifs in its salon pieces. Henri Vever, both a maker and a historian of nineteenth-century French jewellery, mounted his own Japonisme experiments and chronicled the movement in his three-volume La Bijouterie Française au XIXe Siècle.

In London, the Aesthetic Movement encompassed Japonisme alongside reform-Gothic and Greek revival sources. Carlo Giuliano, John Brogden and Robert Phillips produced jewellery with Japanese motifs, and Christopher Dresser, who travelled to Japan in 1876 and 1877 on a buying trip, was a forceful exponent of Japanese principles in the design reform of the period.

In New York, Tiffany & Co. under Edward C. Moore was the most ambitious American interpreter of Japanese metalwork. Moore had assembled a private collection of Japanese decorative arts now held by the Metropolitan Museum, and Tiffany's hollowware and jewellery from the late 1870s onward made systematic use of mixed-metal, mokume-gane and chiselled-iron techniques in the Japanese manner. The firm won grand prizes at successive expositions for these works.

Transition to Art Nouveau

By the late 1890s the Japonisme idiom had merged into Art Nouveau, particularly in the hands of René Lalique, Henri Vever, Lucien Gaillard and Georges Fouquet. Gaillard in particular trained Japanese craftsmen in his Paris workshop and produced horn combs, brooches and pendants with dragonflies, leaves and stylised insects in which the Japanese inheritance is most directly visible. Lalique's celebrated work in horn, plique-à-jour enamel and unconventional materials was likewise rooted in Japanese precedent.

Materials and Techniques

Japonisme expanded the working palette of fine jewellery beyond gold, platinum and the precious stones to include patinated copper alloys, iron, horn, ivory, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, baroque pearl and a wider range of coloured stones used for tonal rather than monetary effect. Cabochon-cut moonstone, opal, chalcedony and jade displaced calibrated brilliant-cut stones in many pieces. Plique-à-jour and basse-taille enamel, used to imitate the watery transparency of Japanese ceramic glazes, became signature techniques of the period.

Legacy

The Japonisme sensibility, with its asymmetry, naturalistic subjects and acceptance of non-precious materials within fine work, has remained an undercurrent in jewellery design ever since. The work of the contemporary maker JAR, with its dark settings, its asymmetric flower studies and its use of unconventional materials, is sometimes traced critically to a Japonisme inheritance, and the same lineage is visible in the twentieth-century French independents Jean Vendome and Andrew Grima, and in much contemporary Japanese fine jewellery.