Japanse waaiers in een rechthoek 1856 - 1897

Henri-Charles Guérard made this etching called ‘Japanese Fans in a Rectangle’, but its date is unknown. It presents us with an example of late 19th-century Japonisme, an artistic fad in France, with complex implications. This fashion for Japanese art involved French artists appropriating imagery and techniques, often with little understanding of their original cultural context. Here, Guérard reproduces images of traditional Japanese fans in a formal arrangement that resembles a printer’s sample sheet. The composition also includes pseudo-calligraphy, showing the artist's interest in Japanese visual culture. France in the late 1800s was a society undergoing rapid modernization and expansion of its colonial reach. Japonisme was therefore bound up with broader issues of cultural exchange and domination. Careful art-historical research helps us understand the power dynamics at play when images cross cultural boundaries. In understanding this artwork, historians consider the unequal economic and political relationship between France and Japan. The meaning of art is always contingent on social and institutional context.