Reframing Japonisme

Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853–1914

Elizabeth Emery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501344664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der Moderne

Japonisme, the nineteenth-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the twenty-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement. This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clémence d'Ennery (1823–1898), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the "Musée d'Ennery" to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a fifty-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d'Ennery's struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day. Travelers to Japan such as the Duchesse de Persigny, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Laure Durand- Fardel returned with souvenirs that they shared with friends and family. Salon hostesses including Juliette Adam, Louise Cahen d'Anvers, Princesse Mathilde, and Marguerite Charpentier provided venues for the discussion and examination of Japanese art objects, as did well-known art dealers Madame Desoye, Madame Malinet, Madame Hatty, and Madame Langweil. Writers, actresses, and artists-Judith Gautier, Thérèse Bentzon, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few- took inspiration from the Japanese material in circulation to create their own unique works of art. Largely absent from the history of Japonisme, these women-and many others-actively collected Japanese art, interacted with auction houses and art dealers, and formed collections now at the heart of museums such as the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi, the Musée Unterlinden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1

“Come Up and See My Monsters”: Chinoiseries, Japonaiseries, and the Musée d’Ennery

On pagoda-roofed shelves that rise from the carpet into the air, this is the menagerie of fantasy. White, green, black, blue, and multi-colored chimeras, all the delirious creatures of an opium dream […] What a striking idea for a woman!¹

—Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 1859

Among all these objects [in the Musée d’Ennery] there are certainly some with considerable historical or artistic value. But what a lot of bazaar trinkets! Next to lovely japonaiseries and chinoiseries, what a lot of japoninneries!²

—Reporter from Le Matin, 1905

Just as I began finalizing my notes on apparitions, gnomes, and hallucinations, I read in the neo-Hegelian Salon of a prominent journal the cuttingly disdainful words: “japonisme, that caprice of blasé dilettantes.” This didn’t upset me, but it did make me concerned that the Japanese will be understood only as skilled wallpaper illuminators, as accomplished realists. I must thus show that they have poets, pure poets, worthy of stirring delicate and inquisitive minds.³

—Philippe Burty, “Japonisme,” 6 July 1872

The Musée d’Ennery was the first house museum built by a woman and bequeathed to the French state (in 1894) as a free public institution of Asian art. It opened on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now avenue Foch) in 1908 and contains some 9,000 artistic representations of fantastical creatures primarily from China and Japan, lovingly organized in “Chinese-Japanese-style” vitrines specially commissioned by Gabriel Viardot.⁴ (Plates 2 and 3 ) Although long thought to be the legacy of successful playwright Adolphe d’Ennery, whose name it bears, the museum was, in fact, the work of his wife, Clémence Lecarpentier Desgranges d’Ennery (1823–98), known to friends by the nickname, Gisette.⁵ She became “Madame Clémence d’Ennery” only in 1881 after the death of her first husband, Charles Desgranges, from whom she had lived estranged since shortly after their 1841 marriage.⁶ Reputed as a wild and witty hostess, the Goncourt brothers described her as one of the two women most “à la mode” in the theatrical and literary world of 1859 (alongside her lifelong friend, the courtesan Jeanne Detourbay, later the Comtesse de Loynes⁷). Gisette-Clémence served as Adolphe’s consort for more than fifty years, hosting weekly Sunday dinners and mixing with the best-known actors, writers, journalists, and demi-mondaines of the nineteenth century: among them were the Félix family of actors (especially Rachel’s sisters Lia and Dinah); writers Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Verne; and newspaper editors Henri Rochefort, Aurélien Scholl, and Georges Clemenceau. In their Journal the Goncourts admired and praised her collection of “monsters,” a group of chimeras that already numbered 150 by the time Jules visited in 1859.⁸ By 1861, when her collection was exhibited at the Drouot auction house, reporters called this set of 200 chimeras “compete,” “rare,” and of “incomparable originality” (E.D., 1861 and “L’Expédition de la Chine,” 1861).

Such praise for the collection in the 1859–61 period contrasts markedly to dismissive representations nearly fifty years later, when she had transformed her mansion on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne into a public museum. By what process did a coherent, “complete,” and “rare” private collection come to be considered, as in the 1905 Le Matin citation above, as a compendium of exotic commercial junk? How could a woman renowned in the 1850s for a strikingly unusual group of Asian chimeras, thousands purchased from the most reputable sources of her time (such as Bing and Hayashi), remain absent from Louis Gonse’s lists of collectors published in L’Art japonais (1883) and Raymond Koechlin’s 1930 recollection of the turn-of-the-century Asian art market?

This chapter focuses on descriptions of Gisette-Clémence’s collection in the 1850s and 1860s in order to explore the “pre-history” of what Burty dubbed japonisme in 1872. The fascination for Japanese culture that swept France after the 1858 “Treaty of Friendship and Commerce,” which forced Japan to open its markets, and the subsequent influx of modern commercial imports have been better documented than their pre-history: antique Japanese objects present in France for centuries and circulating as “chinoiseries.”⁹ Until the widespread use of the geographically specific term “japonaiseries” in the 1870s, nearly all small decorative items originating in East Asia were called “chinoiseries” and they were closely associated with women and the Ancien Régime.¹⁰ Such stereotypes explain Burty’s wounded response, cited in the epigraph above, to the “cuttingly disdainful” dismissal of japonisme as the “caprice of blasé dilettantes.” In order to rectify such notions, he recognized that Western champions of Japanese art would have to convince the public that the Japanese were not just exporters of decorative novelties (“skilled wallpaper painters”), but also artists and “poets.”¹¹

Burty’s definition of japonisme as addressing “questions of history, linguistics, geography, the arts” (1875, 150) directs attention away from the feminine, commercial, and decorative associations of Japanese objects in the marketplace (epitomized by his mention of wallpaper). He gestures instead toward the artists that produced them, thus creating a rift between the allegedly “feminine” taste for decorative chinoiseries and japonaiseries and a new and more active “masculine” (scientifically and artistically motivated) practice of japonisme. Thirty-six years before the opening of d’Ennery’s museum and its description as a “bazaar” by the press, we already see in Burty’s advocacy of the term japonisme an attempt to frame interest in Japan as artistic, ethnographic, and scientific. In order to be respected in the West, Japanese art had to be distanced from an Orient strongly associated with women, exoticism, “blasé” men, and the decoration of the domestic interior. The book and journal titles adopted by figures such as Louis Gonse (L’Art japonais, 1882) and Siegfried Bing (Le Japon artistique, 1888–91) at the end of the century epitomize the resultant shift from commerce and the decorative arts and toward forms of “art” and “literature” more recognizable to Western audiences.¹² They thus championed woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e style (literally: “pictures of the floating world”) as superlative examples of Japanese art, much to the dismay of the Japanese, who considered them ephemeral commercial products.¹³

In the first section of this chapter, I provide an overview of the Musée d’Ennery, its founder, and her early collecting practices as recorded by the Goncourt brothers in the 1850s, well before the 1867 and 1878 Expositions Universelles that created a French vogue for all things Japanese. In the second section, I situate descriptions of d’Ennery’s collection with regard to the vocabulary and associations attached to Asian objects in the nineteenth century. The third reassesses gender stereotypes related to small collectible items from the Far East such as netsuke, ceramics, inrō (medicine boxes), kogo (incense boxes), tsuba (sword guards), and snuffboxes. The mixed reception of the Musée d’Ennery over fifty years stems from a number of factors related not only to a French lack of familiarity with Asian geography, but also to Clémence d’Ennery’s gender and Bohemian lifestyle, the nature and provenance of the small objects she collected, and her curatorial choices.

Gisette Desgranges and her Museum of Monsters

After receiving a flirtatious invitation to come up some night to “see [Gisette’s] monsters” Jules de Goncourt was flabbergasted to find that this was not simple sexual innuendo. He describes in remarkable detail the “delirious creatures of an opium dream” he found in her apartment:

In bronze, jade, porcelain, wood, rock crystal, tonkin, and kaolin, this is a world of animals seemingly taken from the rib of a plesiosaurus and a dragon, antediluvian animals and mythical animals, something hybrid like the world of beasts discovered by Buffon or told by Herodotus, like fetuses of lions and of female camels that resemble hippopotamuses or heraldic beasts, etc.¹⁴

Goncourt’s prose captures the profusion of objects on display, their colors, shapes, forms, and the exotic materials used to make them, as well as their mythological and fantastical origins. He also emphasizes their small and portable nature, indiscriminately mixing references to Asian places and substances (“tonkin,” “kaolin,” “Indian,” “Batavian” [Indonesian]):

They are everywhere, even black and gold ones at the bottom of a box, like those little portable temples of Indian gods. Fat white toads with white lips and an opening in their backs for flowers mark the corners of a table. On a little horn-shaped vase and a porcelain one, animals resembling leeches and caterpillars and Batavian insects climb and swim in turn. The candelabras are supported by monsters, and two monsters carry on their chimerical backs two clocks telling the time and the weather.¹⁵

Although Goncourt visited the museum in an embryonic form (150 objects displayed in two rooms of a small apartment), his description of a “collection of Chinese monsters” still applies today; it reveals the remarkable consistency of Gisette’s collecting habits over nearly sixty years. The museum has grown to encompass some 9,000 objects (6,296 bequeathed by d’Ennery, a subsequent 1,000 donated by friends at the museum’s opening in 1908, and the rest incorporated from bequests after 1908). Figures 1.1, 1.2, and Plates 2, 3, 5 and 7 reveal the prevalence of the monster theme in masks and figures of humans, animals, and mythological creatures made out of ivory, wood, and ceramic.¹⁶ To explain her unusual predilection for “monsters,” she often deployed one of the witty repartees for which she was renowned, playing on the French word chimère, which means both “chimera” and “fantasy”: “Since I no longer have any illusions, I collect fantasies [chimères].”¹⁷

Figure 1.1 Japanese objects from the vitrines of the Musée d’Ennery, illustrated page from La Nature, 7 May 1898, p. 357. Public domain.

Figure 1.2 Chinese and Japanese objects from the vitrines of the Musée d’Ennery, illustrated page from La Nature, 7 May 1898, p. 356. Public domain.

In the 1890s, Clémence d’Ennery often explained that she had started collecting as a “young girl,” a fact seemingly confirmed by references to objects acquired in the 1840s in the handwritten inventories she kept from 1882 until her death in 1898.¹⁸ Chantal Valluy and Lucie Prost, the authors of the only sustained study of the collection, have proposed that she may have been inspired by objects inherited from or gifted by family members in or around 1842, just after her first marriage (1975, 86, 129, 164–66). This seems likely given an 1892 letter to Musée Guimet curator Emile Deshayes in which she mentions two Japanese vases that have been in her family for “100 years.” She mentions, for example, a particularly lovely laque burgauté trunk that previously belonged to her mother.¹⁹ There are several sixteenth-century lacquer trunks in the museum, including Plate 4.

While Gisette adopted a Bohemian lifestyle characteristic of a demi-mondaine, she actually came from an “honorable family” as she told Jules de Goncourt (Journal, 29 December 1859). Historical records confirm this comfortable background: her father, a decorated former military officer, was of noble birth (Lecarpentier de Saint-Amand).²⁰ Furthermore, the Lecarpentier family owned multiple properties in Paris, and upon her marriage in 1841 to Charles Desgranges, the son of the deputy mayor of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, she received a dowry of 95,000 francs from her parents.²¹ Between their separation in 1844, around the time of Charles’s departure for Algeria, and her marriage to Adolphe d’Ennery in 1881, she continued to invest in real estate and stocks.²² As of 1844, she thus had both the legal freedom and the disposable income to build a collection.

When her “Chinese and Japanese museum” opened its doors to the public in 1908, curator Emile Deshayes had placed the thousands of small objects into ninety-nine vitrines. He described eight categories visible in Figures 1.1 and 1.2: statuettes representing people and “true and mythological” animals; netsuke; dolls, display cases of diverse items (including vases, incense burners, paper presses, and snuffboxes); large animal statues; sculpted and gilded wooden panels; masks; mother-of-pearl incrusted furniture; a collection of stands and pedestals visible in Plates 2 and 3 (Deshayes 1908, 15–16). Valluy and Prost have cross-referenced Deshayes’s curatorial notes with d’Ennery’s inventory in order to provide a better sense of the volume of each category: fantastical bea...