Van Gogh and Japanese Prints: How Japan Influenced Impressionism

How Japan and Europe reinvented their perspective

In the 19th century, something unexpected happened.

Objects from a Japan long closed to the world arrived in European ports. Ceramics, fabrics, everyday objects… and, tucked among them, images printed on paper: Japanese prints, or ukiyo-e.

Japanese prints, called ukiyo-e, are woodblock prints produced between the 17th and 19th centuries. They depict daily life, landscapes, actors, and popular figures of Edo Japan.

No one knew it yet, but these images would profoundly transform the Western gaze.

And among those who would be deeply affected: Vincent Van Gogh.

But this story is not one of one-way influence.
It is one of a silent dialogue between two worlds.

Japonism: when Europe discovers a different way of seeing

When Japan opened to international trade in the 1850s, Europe discovered a completely different visual world.

In Paris, these images intrigued, seduced, and circulated. Some arrived as merchandise, others were collected, exhibited, and resold. Figures like Siegfried Bing (art dealer and promoter of Japonism in Paris) and Hayashi Tadamasa (Japanese merchant based in France, specialist in prints) played an essential role in their dissemination.

Very quickly, this fascination took a name: Japonism, a major artistic and cultural movement describing Japan's influence on European art in the 19th century.

But what European artists discovered was not just a style.
It was another way of seeing:

• asymmetrical compositions
• bold, sometimes cropped, framing
• flat areas of color without modeling
• a more direct relationship with nature

Van Gogh: learning to see differently

Van Gogh discovered Japanese prints in 1886 in Paris. He collected several hundred of them.

Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro became his major references.

In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote:

"We painters, we must go to Japan to learn what nature is."

But this Japan he admired was not a real Japan.
It was a Japan reconstructed from images—a mental, almost ideal Japan.

Van Gogh did not merely look. He copied, he studied, he transformed.
His version of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake is the most famous example.

What he retained was not just an aesthetic, but a way of painting:

• simplifying without impoverishing
• intensifying color
• composing freely

These elements, directly inspired by Japanese prints, profoundly marked his work.

A subtle revolution in European painting

Van Gogh was not alone.

The influence of Japanese prints on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism is now widely recognized.

• Monet, too, was influenced by Japanese prints, in his compositions and even in his garden at Giverny.

  During a stay in Norway, facing Mount Kolsaas, he wrote:

  "It looks like Japan, which is common in this country."

  What he observed was not Japan — and yet, his gaze returned to it.

  As in some series of Japanese prints — notably Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — the same motif could be explored through its variations.

  His series, such as Haystacks (1890–1891) or Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894), demonstrate this attention to the motif, repeated and transformed.

• Degas, in his unexpected framings and scenes captured live
• Toulouse-Lautrec, in his bold lines and graphic flat colors

Ukiyo-e did not replace European traditions—they opened up new possibilities.

But Japan was already looking to the West

What is often forgotten is that this exchange worked both ways.

As early as the 19th century, Japanese artists also incorporated elements from elsewhere.

For example:

• Prussian blue (bero-ai), a pigment imported through exchanges with the West, became central in some prints—notably by Hokusai and Hiroshige
• some artists experimented with depth effects inspired by Western perspective, while maintaining their own sensibility

These influences remained measured, subtly integrated.
They did not replace Japanese tradition: they transformed it.

Everyday art that became a revelation

In Japan, ukiyo-e prints were accessible images.

Produced in large numbers, sold at a modest price, they depicted:

• actors
• courtesans
• landscapes
• scenes of daily life

They were not conceived as unique artworks, but as objects for dissemination.

And yet, in Europe, their status radically changed.

They became:

• collector's items
• sources of study
• triggers of modernity

This shift is fascinating:
what was familiar in Japan became revolutionary in the West.

An artistic dialogue between two worlds

The story of Japanese prints in Europe is one of an artistic exchange between Japan and Europe.

Europe discovered in ukiyo-e a freedom it had partly forgotten.
Japan, for its part, gradually incorporated certain Western visual tools.

Between the two, it was neither imitation nor domination—but a discreet, profound, transformative dialogue.

A living legacy

Even today, the influence of Japanese prints can be found in:

• Art Nouveau
• contemporary graphic design
• illustration
• tattoo art
• certain forms of minimalism

But most importantly, it left an essential idea:

that there are always multiple ways of seeing the world.

Conclusion: seeing differently

Van Gogh never went to Japan.

And yet, he found something essential there.

Not a place, but a way of looking.

Japanese prints did not just influence Western art.
They opened a breach.

An invitation to simplify, to feel, to compose differently.

And perhaps, even today, to slow down—
to truly look.

🎌 Come explore the world of Japanese prints in our collection of authentic ukiyo-e!

📚 To go further

• Tsukasa Kodera — Van Gogh and Japan
• Van Gogh Museum — resources “Van Gogh and Japan”
• Gabriel P. Weisberg — Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910
• Timothy Clark — Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (British Museum)
• Christine M. E. Guth — Art of Edo Japan
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — articles on Japonism and ukiyo-e