Reading Comprehension

A favourite story in the history of nineteenth-century European painting concerns the influence of Japanese woodblock prints — known collectively as ukiyo-e — on the work of the French Impressionists and their immediate successors. The prints reached Paris in quantity in the 1860s and 1870s, often as wrapping paper around imported goods, and were collected by painters who recognised, in their flat areas of colour, their use of strong outline, and their unconventional vantage points, something that European pictorial conventions of the period had not been doing. The painters' adoption of certain devices from the prints — the cropped composition, the high horizon, the unmodulated colour — is a matter of clear documentary record.

The story is true but, like most stories of this kind, is often told in a shape that flatters one side of the encounter and obscures the other. The encounter was less a one-way borrowing than a partial conversation in which each side took, from the other, what suited its own existing concerns. The Impressionists' use of ukiyo-e devices served projects internal to French painting — a reaction against academic perspective, a turn to scenes of modern urban life, an interest in light unmodulated by chiaroscuro — that had been developing before the prints arrived and would have continued without them. The prints offered solutions the painters were already looking for; they did not, by themselves, invent the questions.

An equally one-sided telling concerns what the ukiyo-e tradition was before it arrived in Paris. To present the prints as a fund of unattached devices waiting to be taken up by sympathetic European eyes is to ignore that they were, in their own context, the mature production of a several-centuries-old tradition with its own theoretical apparatus, its own commercial structure, and its own internal debates about composition, subject, and reproduction. The prints were not raw material that the European encounter completed; they were finished works whose makers had their own questions and their own answers, which the European borrowing did not always respect.

The honest account of the encounter is therefore double. It is to recognise the real influence on European painting and the real questions that influence helped to answer; and it is to refuse the implicit suggestion that the prints arrived without a tradition of their own or that what they offered was simply a set of compositional tricks. To remember the second is, very often, to remember more accurately what the first amounted to.