Drawing on Japan
Ceramics designed by the artist Félix Bracquemond pioneered the use of motifs drawn from Japanese art in 19th-century French decorative arts. Larry Simms publishes here two extraordinary overlooked porcelain services by Bracquemond that add greatly to our understanding of his career.
Larry Simms, Monday, 25th August 2008
Félix Bracquemond’s contribution to the decorative arts as one of the first designers to use Japanese imagery is unchallenged. Indeed, three of his dinner services have become icons of Japonisme. His Service Rousseau, with its images of flowers, birds, and fish borrowed from Japanese prints, was exhibited to great acclaim at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, where it was recognised for its revolutionary nature. At the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 he unveiled his Service parisien, with Japanese-inspired imagery of the 12 months of the year depicted in terms of changing weather. In 1878 he exhibited his Service animaux, with Japanese images of various land, sea, and air creatures set in landscapes, at the Paris Exposition Universelle. These three services have generally been cited as the most important of Bracquemond’s significant contributions to Japonisme. Curiously overlooked until now are two additional Japoniste services designed by him, both produced in porcelain by Haviland and Company, and both created within the same seminal period between 1867 and 1878.
Some three years after the Service Rousseau was shown at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Bracquemond executed an etching of Japanese subjects (Fig. 1). He has arranged scattered images on a single sheet that is approximately the same size as the 25 separate etchings he produced in preparation for the Service Rousseau.1 This rare print, an example of which is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, is known under the title Treize grâces japonaises because of its subject: 13 beautiful geishas artfully posed in kimonos.2 Here, as in the etchings for the Service Rousseau, Bracquemond copied his images from Japanese prints, including woodcuts by Hokusai.3 As an example, Bracquemond isolated and copied the geisha with the open parasol from a two-page woodcut in Hokusai’s Gashiki (Fig. 5).
It may be that this print was intended to form the basis of a second Japoniste faience service to be produced for Eugène Rousseau but which was never realised. However, in 1872 Charles Haviland, son of David Haviland who established Haviland and Company of Limoges, gave Bracquemond the position of artistic director of the newly established Paris Auteuil Atelier, a design studio for the creation of new transfers to be used at the Limoges factory. Bracquemond’s images of Japanese geishas were used there for a service in porcelain.
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