Kimono fashion ~ by Lesley Downer

Kosode with autumn flowers
by Ogata Kōrin, 18th century
(Tokyo National Museum)

‘First the courtesan Kaoru commissioned the renowned artist Kano Yukinobu to paint a picture of flaming autumn on plain white satin. Eight court nobles were next asked to inscribe vignettes in verse, in black decorative calligraphy, on this gorgeous design. The result was a picture of breath-taking beauty, admirably suitable for a hanging scroll. But Kaoru had no idea of putting it to such trifling use. She had it made into a robe for herself.’

The Life of an Amorous Man, Ihara Saikaku, 1682

The trendsetters of old Japan were the fabulously wealthy and celebrated courtesans of the pleasure quarters, as in the story above, by the famous writer and teller of naughty tales, Ihara Saikaku.

The key word is ‘trifling’ - ‘trifling use’. Why waste a beautiful painting by hanging it on a wall when you could have it made into a kimono? Then you could wear it and reveal how the painted image would change as you draped it on your body and, even more spectacularly, how it would flow as you moved, transforming it from a two dimensional object to a three dimensional work of art!

'Whose sleeves?'

Tagasode, 16th - 17th century (Met Museum)

There’s a genre of painting in Japan called Tagasode - 'Whose Sleeves?' Whose indeed? There are no people in these pictures, no beautiful women, just kimonos, draped seductively over a lacquered clothing frame. In old Japan a picture like this was considered provocative, even erotic. Just as a person’s fragrance and belongings can strongly evoke them, so it’s an invitation to speculate on the wearer. How gorgeous must the lady be who wraps herself up in one of these! In terms of allure clothing counts for as much as or more than the body wrapped up inside.

Moronobu Hishikawa (1618-1694) (Met Museum)

In woodblock prints the faces and figures of the courtesans, dancing girls and kabuki actors tend to be rather simply delineated, a hint rather than a studious portrait, not much differentiated. The focus is on the kimonos, rather, which are ravishing and distinctive. In this print by Moronobu each kimono is different.

Kimonos as art
Kimonos are always the same shape. What makes them different is not the cut or the style, which never change, but the painted design. In Japan the kimono is very far from just a garment. It is an art form and the great kimono designers are revered as artists. Museums worldwide show exhibitions of kimonos, both historical and contemporary. And in the women’s palace of the shogun’s castle in Edo (now Tokyo) and in daimyo’s castles and in wealthy merchants’ homes, sumptuous kimonos were hung on lacquered racks as a form of interior decoration.

Kosode moyo hinagata bon. Book
of painted kosode designs, second half
17th century (Met Museum)

In fact the silk kosode (the basic kimono) was the primary canvas for artistic expression in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. Kosode were often works of art on a par with paintings.

As in the story above, some designs feature written characters or whole poems used as decoration. Literature, the visual arts and traditional motifs and themes such as the ‘One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets’ happily combine with textiles to make a unified work of art. The artist incorporates their reaction to the feeling of the poem in their design, sometimes including a line or phrase in the pattern.

In the Edo period (1603-1868) kimono designers were as high in status, if not higher, than woodblock artists. Many artists, beginning with Moronobu, created kimono patterns. The legendary woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave and much else, also made designs for kimono fabric. He did small repeat patterns which became popular in the late Edo era when sumptuary laws restricting elaborate dress were increasingly enforced.

Kimono pattern books (Hinagata-bon)
Shops turned out kimono pattern books for every season promoting the latest fashions. A clerk would take a selection of books to a daimyo’s castle or a wealthy merchant’s home so that the lady of the house or an assistant could choose suitable designs. Less wealthy clients could go to the shop and study the pattern books there. Every year you would need to order new kimonos so as to keep up with the fashion.

 

Pattern book (hinagata-bon)
Enoki Hironobu 1751 (Met Museum)

The pattern books show designs for younger women, older women, young men, courtesans - but that doesn’t mean that the purchaser of the books would commission such designs, just as you wouldn’t actually expect to wear the clothes you see on the catwalk at Fashion Week. The pattern books were more like fashion magazines, like Vogue. People who couldn’t afford or wouldn’t want to wear such extravagantly glamorous clothes could still enjoy thumbing through the pages.

If you decided to commission a kimono, first you would choose your pattern from the pattern books. The tailor would record details of your requirements then make full size draft drawings with specifications to send to the dyers or embroiderers for the next stage of the production process. Once the decoration was finished the garment would be complete. 

Kosode, Edo period, 18th century, design of autumn
grasses and brushwood fences on  light green
chirimen crepe (Tokyo National Museum)

Edo period sumptuary laws decreed what sort of fabrics and designs you could and couldn’t wear. Certain fabrics and designs were reserved for the ladies of the imperial court or of the women’s palace at Edo Castle or for extremely high-ranking daimyos’ ladies. Conversely townswomen in particular were prohibited from wearing luxurious fabrics. 

As a result both they and their tailors became expert at, for example, designing a very plain unostentatious jacket with an incredibly expensive, over the top lining. It was the height of chic to dress very conservatively, allowing just a flash of the glorious lining to be seen.

The courtesans were famously flashy dressers. Yet what men found the most provocative was not the layers and layers of brilliantly coloured and heavily embroidered fabric - it was the tiny bare foot peeking out from under the voluptuous skirts, the only hint of the real woman gift-wrapped inside it all.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see  http://www.lesleydowner.com/.

Pictures courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tokyo National Museum - by way of Wikimedia Commons. 

How Vincent Van Gogh Fell in Love with Japan - by Lesley Downer

‘a little yellow house with green door and shutters, whitewashed inside - on the white walls - very brightly coloured Japanese drawings - red tiles on the floor.’ 

A couple of weekends ago I was in Amsterdam to see an irresistible exhibition - Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum. I wondered what Vincent, poor tormented soul, would have made of that vast glitzy museum devoted to his works and memory, with its mobs of visitors and museum shops selling everything from Van Gogh luggage to Van Gogh dog coats. He was not exactly poor. His brother Theo who worked for a Paris art dealer took care of him. But he never found much success either during his life. He only sold one painting to anyone other than Theo.

Sudden Shower over Shin Ohashi, Atake, Hiroshige (L)

Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), Van Gogh (R)

In February 1886, when Van Gogh was thirty three, he arrived back in Paris after ten years roaming from Ramsgate to the Low Countries. He lived there with Theo for two years and made friends with artists such as Émile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac. 

He also became acquainted with the celebrated art dealer Siegfried Bing. Pretty much ever since Japan opened to the west in 1858 the west had been flooded with Japanese arts and crafts. All Paris along with half the western world was afire with Japonisme, unbridled enthusiasm for all things Japanese, and Siegfried Bing had largely cornered the market.

Over the following winter Van Gogh bought up more than 600 Japanese woodblock prints. He planned to sell them. But as he leafed through them he was transfixed by the dramatic designs, compositions, bright colours, strong lines and extraordinary viewpoints, all startling and fresh to western eyes.

It’s well known that Van Gogh was much influenced by Japanese art but this is the first exhibition to bring together so many of Van Gogh’s paintings alongside the prints that inspired them. It also broadens out the picture to reveal how much Van Gogh’s view of life was brightened by what he called these ‘cheerful prints’ - and how they played a part in shaping other aspects of his life.

Courtesan (after Eisen) by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s first forays into Japanese art were to paint copies of three woodblock prints. One was Keisai Eisen’s Courtesan which featured on the cover of a special Japan edition of the magazine Paris Illustré. The others were landscape prints by Hiroshige which he had bought. It’s extraordinary to contrast Van Gogh’s dense impassioned brush strokes with the clean cool lines of the Japanese originals. The images are the same though he’s surrounded his courtesan with Japanese motifs - bamboo, cranes, frogs and waterlilies. But the techniques and mood and final effect are radically different.

He also painted a portrait of his art dealer, Julien Tanguy, against a backdrop of woodblock prints, including Van Gogh’s own courtesan painting.

Portrait of Pere Tanguy by Vincent Van Gogh

After two years in Paris he couldn’t stand the hustle and bustle any longer and in 1888 moved south. It was as if he was besotted with Japan, looking for it everywhere. On the way south he kept gazing out of the train window to see ‘if it was like Japan yet.’ He was sure he would find his dream of Japan there. He took with him a few woodblock prints, not famous or expensive ones but cheerful colourful depictions of landscapes and women.

In Arles, the natural beauty and bright light and cheerful colours recreated Japan for him. The southern light, he wrote, turned everything into ‘Japan’. There was a field of irises there which he painted and described as a Japanese dream. He writes of the landscape of La Crau with its peach trees, ‘Everything there is small, the gardens, the fields, the trees, even those mountains, as in certain Japanese landscapes, that’s why this subject attracted me.’ ‘I’m always saying to myself that I’m in Japan here,’ he said in another letter. ‘That as a result I only have to open my eyes and paint right in front of me what makes an impression on me.’ 

Rock of Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh

Hakone by Ando Hiroshige

In the exhibition Van Gogh’s paintings hang close to the Japanese prints which inspired them. He sought out subjects akin to those which he saw in the prints. There is a dramatic painting of a quarry, The Rock of Montmajour, dotted with trees, of which he writes, ‘You’ll well remember there are Japanese drawings where grasses and little trees grow there and there’. Hung opposite is Hiroshige’s dramatic print of the crags at Hakone with a huge crag, with grass and trees growing out of it, dwarfing the people and hanging at an impossible angle over the water.

 

The paintings Van Gogh did in Arles are very different from his earlier work. ‘After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel colour differently,’ he wrote to Theo. He plays with colour, laying on bright flat areas of intense colour with impassioned brush strokes. He painted The Yellow House set against a flat blue sky almost more solid than the house itself and his bedroom and yellow bed using ‘flat plain tints like Japanese prints,’ with strong outlines, flat colour planes and no shadows. Inspired by the Japanese prints which hung around his studio, he applied thick black contour lines and played with extraordinary perspectives and viewpoints. He painted Almond Blossom, seen from below against a dazzling turquoise sky, in honour of the birth of his nephew, Theo’s son. In The Sower, the dramatic diagonal of the tree trunk cuts across the picture, silhouetted against a huge yellow sun.

Self-portrait dedicated to
Gauguin by Vincent van Gogh

In Arles Van Gogh hoped to enjoy his dream of a Japanese way of life. He imagined humble Japanese woodblock print artists living and working together like monks in a monastery and decided to set up an artists’ colony with his friend Paul Gauguin as the leader. Like Japanese artists, they exchanged self portraits. In the portrait he sent Gauguin he depicts himself as a very un-Buddha-like Japanese monk with a shaven head and intense wild eyes, somewhat slanted.

But as we know it didn’t work out. The collaboration with Gauguin came to an end, the artists’ colony fell through. Van Gogh cut off his ear, checked himself into a hospital and painted feverishly, producing a painting a day. When he couldn’t go outside he painted through the bars of his window.

The last part of this absorbing and fascinating exhibition takes us right inside Van Gogh’s studio, surrounded by the Japanese prints that he had pinned to the wall - unframed, working tools, some torn and paint-stained. He often mentions the cheeriness of the brightly-coloured prints of landscapes and beautiful women. Perhaps he hoped to find peace of mind by surrounding himself with such serene images. But alas, that was the one thing he was destined never to find.

Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, continues till June 24th 2018.




Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All Van Gogh images © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

All other images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Life begins at 60: Hokusai at the British Museum by Lesley Downer

In pre-modern Japan the belief was that we start a whole new lifecycle at the age of 60. The Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum focuses on the celebrated artist’s work after this seminal age. Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) was in his early seventies when he created his iconic Great Wave and he looked forward to making more and more progress as he got older.

The Great Wave at Kanagawa by Hokusai 

He wrote, ‘Until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. ... When I reach 80 years I hope to have made increasing progress, and at 90 to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art and at 110 every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.’

The exhibition begins with a few pictures he did as a mere youngster, before the age of sixty, which are of course spectacular. One of these brilliantly-brushed works depicts a pop-eyed dragon with long whiskers like a gargantuan shrimp, bursting through clouds clutching a koto - a Japanese zither - in its long curved claws.

Dragon by Hokusai 1798

In the 1820s, when Hokusai was in his sixties, he was commissioned to create some prints by the Dutch East India Company, the only westerners allowed in Japan at the time. This brought him into contact with western art with its intriguing use of perspective. Traditionally in Chinese and Japanese art distant objects like mountains were painted at the top of the picture. Hokusai began to play with perspective in his own work, making distant objects smaller, depicting Fuji seen through the curve of the Great Wave, for example, or rather humorously through a barrelmaker’s hoop. Depicting the mighty mountain as a small cone is the running gag of his Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, of which The Great Wave is one.

The Dutch also brought over the fabulous new paint colour, Prussian blue, which Hokusai used to dramatic effect in the Great Wave.

Fisherman rinsing rice for his morning meal -
 from Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji

These Hokusai prints are the very first to spring from the meeting of eastern and western traditions. The influence soon began to flow the other way as well. Ten years after Hokusai’s death, in 1859, Japan opened to the west. The British Museum bought its first Hokusai in 1860. In 1871 Claude Monet was on his first trip to Holland, in a shop in Amsterdam, haggling over a piece of Delft porcelain. ‘Suddenly I saw a dish filled with images below on a shelf,’ he wrote. ‘Japanese woodblocks!’ The merchant, unaware of their value, threw them in as a job lot with the jar. By the end of his life Monet had collected 231 woodblock prints and they much influenced his work. Many western artists were hugely influenced by Japanese art - the emphasis on line, on design, the extraordinary perspectives - including Van Gogh who in 1888 wrote, ‘All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.’ To his brother Theo he wrote of the Great Wave, ‘These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.’

Debussy's La Mer

Hokusai’s prints are art for the people. The Great Wave cost the same as a couple of bowls of noodles. While the rich beautified their alcoves with incredibly expensive hanging scrolls, Hokusai made long narrow woodblock prints which were much cheaper, so ordinary folk could have a beautiful image in their alcove too.

The focus of the British Museum exhibition is the Great Wave but there’s much more than that, fabulous prints displaying Hokusai’s crisp, sharp brush strokes which, having studied Japanese ink painting myself, I am in awe of. There are many examples of his incredible imagination and sense of humour, his quirky way of looking at the world, wonderful scenes of everyday life - not the life of samurai but of the humble workers who surrounded Hokusai and were a part of his world.

In his later years Hokusai lived with his daughter Oi who was a fine artist in her own right. She may well have designed some of the prints that are signed with Hokusai’s name. Obviously they’d go for far more if they were signed with the master’s name, not hers. There are works signed by her in the exhibition, portraying the courtesans of the pleasure quarters, for example, through a woman’s eyes.

Dragon rising above Mount Fuji
day of the dragon 1849

In the end Hokusai didn’t live quite as long as he’d hoped. When he died at the age of 89, he left a death poem:

‘Maybe I’ll unwind
by roaming the summer fields
as a will o’ the wisp.’

His last picture was of a dragon soaring above Mount Fuji, as his spirit soared off into eternity.

Lesley Downer's latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is set in Hokusai's Japan and comes out in paperback on July 27th. For more see her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/.