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
For Bracquemond’s first three Japoniste services, Service Rousseau, Service figures et accessoires japonais, and Service fleurs et oiseaux jetés, he composed multiple images in a random fashion on each etching sheet, and these were designed to be cut apart and placed in various combinations on the blanks. However, in his fourth service, the Service parisien, designed around 1875, each of the 13 etchings was a unified composition intended to be placed as a whole on each porcelain plate blank. It is not known why Bracquemond used unified compositional etchings for the Service parisien, but it is clear that the designs for the Service fleurs et oiseaux jetés show him moving in that direction.
Comparing plates from the two sets shows how this all came about (Fig. 14). The Service fleurs et oiseaux jetés luncheon plate shown at the top is visually and aesthetically coherent, and looks forward to the dinner plate, La lune, from the Service parisien shown below it. Although similar in appearance, the method used to achieve the two was markedly different. The composition – created from four separate transfers – on the Service fleurs et oiseaux jetés luncheon plate suggests a landscape with ground and sky. But to achieve this effect, motifs from three separate sheets of etchings were used.24 Here, Bracquemond’s attempt to convey a Japoniste landscape was dependent on the ability of the factory worker to follow what must have been his recommended placement of motifs in relation to one another. This dependence on the factory worker to execute what he intended may have inspired Bracquemond to create the etchings for the Service parisien, in which each bird, branch, and atmospheric suggestion has a fixed and exact relation to each other. Moreover, unlike the earlier sets, in which monochrome designs were transferred to the ceramics and then hand-painted, the designs for the Service parisien were transferred from chromolithographic prints, providing the precise colours that Bracquemond wanted. In these ways, his dependence on factory workers to achieve his Japoniste vision accurately was eliminated.
Bracquemond’s importance in incorporating Japanese images into the vocabulary of French 19th-century decorative arts is paramount. His Service figures et accessoires japonais and his Service fleurs et oiseaux jetés provide additional evidence of such activity, and offer insight into his artistic development within this significant genre. Moreover, with our new certainty that two, if not all three, of his Japoniste porcelain services were shown in Haviland and Company’s booth at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the presence of Japonisme at this international fair was far greater than previously recognised.
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