Winter Garden

Hiroshige UTAGAWA • Prints

A major artist of 19th-century Japan, Utagawa Hiroshige was one of the great image makers of the Edo period, whose series of landscapes were hugely successful in Europe. He took Japanese printmaking to unprecedented heights. His genius lay in depicting the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes through scenes of everyday life. Never before had a master of ukiyo-e understood and conveyed the very soul of nature and landscapes so well. His best-known series are ‘The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō’, ‘One Hundred Views of Edo’, ‘The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō’, as well as his series on fish, birds and flowers. He profoundly influenced many Western artists, including Claude Monet.

SIX-PANEL FOLDING SCREEN

This folding screen, made from wallpapers from the Parisian manufacture of Jules Desfossé imitating oriental lacquer (patterns of stairs, pagodas, numerous characters fishing or engaged in tea ceremonies), is the "twin" of the screen that was once in Marcel Proust's bedroom, now housed in the Carnavalet Museum (Paris).

Mayor of Cabourg in 1855, Adolphe d’Ennery married Clémence Desgranges, a pioneering collector of Asian art, who went on to create the current Musée d’Ennery in Paris, part of the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques – Guimet. Many prominent figures of the Belle Époque collected Japanese art, fascinated by this country and its culture, which was then beginning to open to the rest of the world. Marcel Proust was introduced to Japonism by his friend Robert de Montesquiou, a lover of Japanese prints and screens who was nicknamed ‘the Japanese man of Passy’. Proust frequented the gallery of the retailer Siegfried Bing, the first promoter of Japanese art in France, and quoted Hokusai’s prints in Jean Santeuil.

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