L'art japonais

First edition, one of 1,400 numbered copies, only issue.

Outstanding publisher’s cream silk Bradel binding signed by Engel at the foot of the spine, flat spine decorated with Japanese characters; upper boards in excellent condition, elaborately decorated with a reproduction of Shinman’s starlings against a setting sun from the Henri Cernuschi collection (also illustrated pl. 26, vol. 1); corners slightly rubbed; both volumes complete with their illustrated dust jackets, showing tears and some losses.

Illustrated with 64 tissue-guarded plates, most in colour (13 etchings, 21 heliogravures, 2 typographic engravings in black and gold, 10 chromolithographs and 18 watercolours), the majority signed by Gillot and Guérard. Numerous illustrations in black throughout.

An exceptional copy of the first history of Japanese art written outside of Asia, housed in its magnificent publisher’s silk binding signed by Jean Engel, in pristine condition throughout: “with its one thousand and twenty-four illustrations in black and in colour, is not a conventional ornamental repertoire. It marks a clear break with traditional perception and reception of Japanese art that had prevailed in France and the West since the 1860s” (François Gonse, “Une histoire de l’art japonais en 1883. L’œil de Louis Gonse”, Histoire de l’art, N°40-41, 1998).

The author Louis Gonse was an art historian, exhibition curator and director of the Gazette des beaux-arts. The celebrated Asian art dealer Tadamasa Hayashi, who had come to Paris as an interpreter for the Exposition Universelle of 1878, helped him in the preparation of L’Art japonais. Translated into English in 1891 and into Japanese in 1893, this seminal work proved a landmark publication. Its illustrations include works by artists much admired among French Japonistes, including Hokusai and Hiroshige, whom Gonse hailed as “the greatest paysagist” of 19th-century Japan. “His views of Yedo”, he wrote, “helped us better understand the country than all of previous traveler’s descriptions”. The discovery of this new formal repertoire was to exert a considerable influence on artists of the fin-de-siècle, among them Félix Régamey and Henri Guérard, who engraved some of the illustrations in this volume.