A Girl in Japanese Gown. The Kimono

After the opening-up of Japan and the expansion of trade routes in the mid-nineteenth century, Japonisme immediately spread across Europe and America. Just as the paintings of the Paris Impressionists adopted certain compositional features of Japanese engravings and elements of Oriental styles, William Merritt Chase felt similarly attracted by everything Oriental. In the 1880s the American painter produced a series of “kimono portraits” of a few relatives and friends including A Girl in Japanese Gown in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. The artist’s newfound enthusiasm for Oriental styles is closely linked to the influence of the Japanese-inspired paintings of James Whistler, who also professed a great attraction for Oriental textiles, designs and objects. Chase had met Whistler in London in summer 1885 and the two had immediately taken a liking to each other. The artists painted each other’s portrait, and Chase soon began to display his compatriot’s influence in his female portraits. In her study on the Thyssen-Bornemisza A Girl in Japanese Gown, Kathleen Pyne links it to Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen in which a girl dressed in an elegant kimono poses seated before a screen viewing a set of Japanese prints, no doubt the series of the Famous Views of the Sixty-Odd Provinces by Hiroshige, the Japanese artist who most greatly influenced Whistler. The female figure in Chase’s work is not only clad in the silk kimono that gives the painting its title but is seated on a low bamboo chair before an Oriental screen and studies a series of sheets with Japanese drawings, like the young woman in Whistler’s painting. Furthermore, the ascending perspective and the asymmetry of the composition display the same influence but can also be related to another essential influence in Chase’s oeuvre, photography. In other respects, the concern Chase shows here for creating a mysterious, contemplative atmosphere and for modulating light, together with the loose brushwork, deserve him the title of pioneer of American Impressionism. Paloma Alarcó