Japonisme | Impressionist and Post-impressionist Prints
Arriving in Europe as early as the 1830s, Japanese woodblock prints reverberated throughout the West. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle set a fire in the hearts of European art collectors. By the 1870s, ukiyo-e prints reached the height of fashion, inciting a mania amongst art enthusiasts and inspiring the brightest minds in Western art. From Monet to Degas, Van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec, Western artists were forever changed by the compositional daring and unfaltering beauty of ukiyo-e. Such artistic fervor for all things Japanese gave rise to Japonisme, an artistic movement that provided a fresh visual language for a changing world.