Japonisme and Architecture in France, 1550-1930
Résumé
Is Japonisme also a history of architecture? In this book, the authors lay bare the origins of the
taste for Japanese architecture in the West. Born long before what French nineteenth-century
art critics called Japonisme, this taste can be detected in a wealth of objects: screens, porcelain,
lacquer-work, woodcuts, photographs, as well as in interior decoration and garden pavilions . . .
With more than 500 illustrations in colour, this handsome book presents noteworthy historical and
archaeological studies of the best-known buildings from the heyday of Japonisme: the pavilions at
the Paris Universal Exhibitions between 1867 and 1900; the first Japanese living space fitted out
in France (1886); the Salle de fêtes, a function room on the rue de Babylone in Paris known today
as La Pagode cinema (1896); the follies in Albert Kahn’s Japanese garden at Boulogne-Billancourt
(1897) (cover image); and the Stork Chamber, an exhibition set salvaged by Émile Guimet in
1911. These investigations reveal an interplay in artistic output between Japan and France that is
essential to an understanding of those Japanese spaces held in such high regard by Westerners.
Leafing through the book, the reader is left in no doubt about the emergence of a stately expression
of Japonisme – in architecture.