JAPANISM in the Cos Cob art colony

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Susan G. Larkin

In September 1899, an article in the Art Interchange described the summer school that the American impressionist artist John H. Twachtman conducted in the waterfront hamlet of Cos Cob, Connecticut. The writer differentiated rustic Cos Cob from "fashionable Greenwich," the larger town of which it is a part, and named some of the painters who had found inspiration there in addition to Twachtman: Theodore Robinson, Julian Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Leonard Ochtman, and Robert Reid. Attesting to the antiquity and charm of the pre-revolutionary house where the artists boarded, the author added, "As we row in at night from the Riverside Yacht Club, the old house with its gayly lighted paper lanterns looks almost Japanese." [1] The house, then owned by the Holley family, is now called the Bush-Holley House and is a museum operated by the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.

The combination of American tradition and worldly sophistication described by the writer for the Art Interchange was characteristic of the Cos Cob art colony, a diverse group of artists and writers that thrived from 1890 until about 1920. The colony members' diaries, letters, snapshots, and artworks offer unusual insights into the diverse sources of Japanism and its varied expressions in their paintings, homes, and gardens.

The art colonists were not unique in their enthusiasm for Japanese culture. The Western fascination with Japan originated when Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) of the United States Navy began the process in 1854 that opened Japan to global trade after the island archipelago had spent more than two centuries in self-imposed isolation. [2] While Americans were later preoccupied with the Civil War, Europeans responded quickly to the artifacts that poured from Yokohama into London and Paris. Everything from silver to greeting cards, books, plays, and music attested to the phenomenon that the French dubbed japonisme. Artists, including the expatriate American James McNeil Whistler (see Pl. XIII) and the French impressionists, discovered fresh ideas in Japanese art. By the time Japanism gripped the general public in the United States following the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, Americans derived their knowledge of Japanese aesthetics both directly from the woodblock prints, textiles, a nd ceramics exported from Japan and indirectly through the paintings and designs of artists based in Europe.

The ultimate source of Japanism was not just Japan, however. A passion for Chinese motifs--chinoiserie--preceded and paved the way. Because Japanese goods were so long unavailable, Westerners identified Chinese artifacts with the mysterious world they called the Far East. When Japan was opened to global trade, importers like Siegfried Bing (1838-1905) in Paris, Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843-1917) in London, and A. A. Vantine and Company in New York City sold objects from other countries along with those from Japan. Vantine's catalogue, for example, identified the firm as "importers from the Empires of Japan, China, India, Turkey Persia and the East." [3] Further, because much of Japanese art is indebted to Chinese sources, as American is to European, it is often difficult to isolate purely Japanese influences.

The problems of teasing apart the sources of inspiration are revealed in two paintings by Twachtman, both titled Arques-la-Bataille (Pls. I, II). In the summer of 1884, Twachtman, who was then enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris, rented a house near the Arques River in Normandy. There, he set his easel on the riverbank to paint the unremarkable scene shown in Plate II. The tranquil mood, limited palette, and simplified forms recall Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, which Twachtman knew at least secondhand through the work of Whistler. In his Paris studio the following winter, Twachtman painted a large-scale version of this landscape (P1. I) in which he intensified its Asian--and Whistlerian--qualities. He enhanced its serenity by applying the paint more thinly smoothing the irregular edges of shoreline and shadows, and replacing the dancing wildflowers and spiky sedge with elegant calligraphic reeds. Although Arques-la-Bataille seems the most Oriental of Twachtman's paintings, he more thoroughly internalized Asian art a decade later, when he indulged his enthusiasm with two close friends and fellow members of the Cos Cob art colony Theodore Robinson and J. Alden Weir.

Robinson recorded in his diary the exhibitions they attended together, the prints they purchased, and the lessons they learned from Japanese prints. On October 31, 1893, he visited Twachtman at his home in Greenwich. Twachtman, who had just returned from Boston, was "most enthusiastic" about the Hokusai exhibition he had seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and "thought there is much to be learned therefrom," Robinson wrote, adding, "I like much T's ideas." [4] That Thanksgiving, after poring over Japanese prints with Weir, Robinson mused, "I imagine the best men have been influenced for the better by Japanese art, not only in arrangements, but in their extraordinary delicacy of tone and color." [5] Ten days later, after spending an evening discussing Japanese art with Twachtman and Weir, Robinson jotted, "Tw. & W. are rabid just now on the J." [6]