A. Critical and Comparative Studies

1. Hartmann, Sadakichi. ‘The Influence of Japanese Art on Western Civilization’. In Japanese Art (see D12b), 1903.

Chapter 5 of Hartmann’s history of Japanese art is the earliest detailed study of its effects in Europe and America, and offers a well-understood account of the growing Western interest in Japan from the early seventeenth century through the Japonisme of the closing decades of the nineteenth. Hartmann makes claims that are perceptive and fascinating, even if not wholly supportable. The influence of Japanese art ‘was felt everywhere’ in the West, in painting, interior design, music, theatre, and poetry, though the only specific claim for the last of these is that in the poems of Poe we can find a ‘law of repetition with slight variation’, which according to Hartmann is a feature of Japanese aesthetics.