“Girl in a Japanese Costume”
This oil on canvas portrait painting, titled “Girl in a Japanese Costume”, is by the American Impressionist artist, William Merritt Chase, from circa 1890.
After 200 years of isolation, Japan opened up to the west in the 1850s and 1860s, forming trade partnerships. The sudden influx of Japanese goods, such as woodcuts, woodblock prints, screens, fans, porcelain, and clothes, had a huge impact on the Western world. After the World’s Fair in 1862, Japanese art became extremely popular and influenced many artists of the day, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Vincent Van Gogh.
This portrait by Chase displays the growing interest in the Japanese style, known as Japanism or Japonisme. This exotic style heavily influenced the Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century that Chase and his colleague, James McNeill Whistler, were a part of.
William Merritt Chase acquired a collection of Japanese costumes and textiles for the sitters in his studio. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, he painted several portraits of women in Japanese dress, often his daughters. The girl in this portrait dressed in Japanese costume represents what would have been high cutting-edge fashion in its day.
“Girl in a Japanese Costume” is currently in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York, the United States.
For more on William Merritt Chase, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
