Japonisme

Around 1856, the French printmaker Félix Bracquemond came across a volume of Hokusai Manga at a printer's workshop in Paris and later bought one himself. After trade between Japan and the West resumed in 1858, Japanese goods began to appear in small shops in Paris and London, and the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris was one of the first places Japanese art was shown publicly in the West. In 1872 the critic Philippe Burty gave the wave a name, Japonisme. The flat areas of color in ukiyo-e, lines cutting diagonally across the picture, asymmetric composition, and empty space showed European painters another way to arrange a picture. In 1887 Van Gogh painted an oil copy of Utagawa Hiroshige's Plum Park in Kameido from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo; James Tissot collected Japanese art and painted it into his pictures.

Look for large flat areas of color, lines running diagonally across the picture, and space deliberately left empty.

Is there anything in this picture that reminds you of Japanese pictures?