Vincent Van Gogh (1853 – 1890) is often mentioned as one of the best examples of Japonism, Western art inspired by Japanese art. However, that is not the full picture.
Van Gogh was infatuated with a vision of Japanese art. He experienced this mainly from Japanese woodblock prints which became widely available after Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 after abt 250 years of seclusion.
Van Gogh and his brother Theo dealt in these prints for a while and van Gogh´s studio was literally plastered with them. Van Gogh vision of Japan was a mythical fantasy, an ideal for the artist, and he even tried to establish an artist´s colony to live out this dream.
Japan, on the other hand, and especially the woodblock print artists, were inspired by earlier Dutch engraved prints, which had a profound influence on artists like Katsushika Hokusai from abt 1800. It was from these prints Western perspective entered into Japanese art.
In the period from abt 1800 to 1850 Japanese prints evolved with Hokusai´s 36 Views of Mt Fuji and became the inspiration that met painters like van Gogh. In a way, what these Western artists saw, was a Japanese mirror of their own processed artistic tradition.
