The painter Hokusai was an icon in France before being recognized in Japan

With the exhibition “La Vague Hokusai”. In addition, the Nantes History Museum welcomes, from June 28 to September 7, 2025, many masterpieces of the painter Katsushika Hokusa (1760-1849), belonging to the Hokusai-Kan d’Obus museum, in the Japanese Alps.

The title of the Nantes exhibition pays homage to the most illustrious print in Hokusai. Nevertheless, the one whose reproductions and diversions have invaded public space until saturation: Under the wave off Kanagawafirst of Thirty-six views of Mount Fujithis “wave as mythological” of a hokusai “carried away, expeditious, buffoon, population”, hailed in 1888 by the critic Félix Fénéon.

European recognition – Painter hokusai icon france before

The icon was baptized by a French writer. Moreover, Edmond de Goncourt, in the monograph he devoted to Hokusai in 1896:

“Planche, which should be called” the wave “, and which is like the drawing, a little dedicated by a painter, painter hokusai icon france before under the religious terror of the formidable sea surrounding his homeland, which gives you the angry of his climb in the sky, the deep azure of the transparent interior of his curve, the tear of his crest, which is scattered in a rain of drilters. Nevertheless, »»

Hokusai, whose Japan today proclaims genius, appears as a universal glory.

It was however in the West that he acquired his fame in the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, and more singularly in France, the cradle of artistic Japanism.

The lawyer for Impressionists. Meanwhile, Japanese art, Théodore Duret, could thus write in 1882:

“Man of the people, at the start of the industrial artist, [Hokusai] occupied vis-à-vis artists, his contemporaries, cultivating “the great art” of the Chinese tradition, a lower position, similar to that of the Lenain vis-à-vis the Lebrun and the Mignard or the Daumier and the Gavarni in front of the laureates of the School of Rome. Furthermore, […] It was only since the judgment of Europeans placed him at the top of his nation’s artists that. painter hokusai icon france before Consequently, the Japanese universally recognized in him one of their great men. Furthermore, »»

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Japan downgraded – Painter hokusai icon france before

Confirming this diagnosis. For example, the eminent Bostonian orientalist Ernest Fenollosa wrote a scathing preface to the catalog of the first Hokusai retrospective organized in 1900 in Tokyo by the publisher and collector Kobayashi Bunshi:

“It would seem strange that Hokusai, recognized in the West for forty years as one of the greatest world masters in drawing, has never been considered worthy of study in painter hokusai icon france before his native country, if we were not aware of the fatal cleavage between aristocrats and plebeians at the Tokugawa era, whose present prolongs the sinister shadow. Furthermore, […] Government representatives deemed this exposure demoralizing. However, As for the rare underground collectors, they would reduce, it is said, to see their name published among the contributors. Moreover, »»

Which could then have predicted that theukiyo-e would become the privileged instrument of soft power Japanese?

The role of private collectors

The spectacular exhibition recently dedicated by the Tokyo National Museum to the XVIII publisher^e century Tsutaya Juzaburo. For example, in particular sponsor of Utamaro, testifies to the paradigm change initiated at the beginning of the XX^e century. However, In the windows. Furthermore, many prints of contemporaries of Hokusai, now revered but despised in Japan of Meiji (1868-1912), bear the seal of the famous intermediary Hayashi Tadamasa, supplier, in the 19th century^e painter hokusai icon france before Century, the main Japanese collectors: the Goncourt brothers, the Siegfried Bing merchant and the jeweler Henri Vever, whose most beautiful pieces then passed through Japanese public collections through the Matsukata Kōjirō patron. Hokusai owes his fortune to the clairvoyance of particular collectors who braved in Japan. an aesthetic and social dogmatism and, in France, institutional academism.

Like the art critic Théodore de Wyzewa wrote in 1890 Japanese prints:

“The very faults of their perspective. their modeling enhanced us as a protest against rules for too long suffered. »»

Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard were only waiting for this encouragement.

A persistent misunderstanding

The cleavage persisted when Paul Claudel. then ambassador to Japan, said in 1923 a conference in front of Japanese students in Nikkō. His judgment. which directly echoes that of Fenollosa, specifies the reasons for the success in France of Hokusai, perceived as a cousin of the painters of modern life:

“It is striking to see how much in the appreciation of the painter hokusai icon france before works that [l’art japonais] produced, our taste has long remained far from yours. Our preference went to the painters of the “Ukiyoyé” school. which you rather consider as the testimony of an era of decadence, but for which you will excuse me for having personally preserved all my old enthusiasm: towards a violent, pompous, theatrical, colorful, spiritual, picturesque, infinitely diverse and animated performance of everyday. It is man in his familiar decor and his daily occupations that holds the greatest place there. Your taste. on the contrary, goes towards ancient images, where man is only represented by some monastic effigies which almost participate in the immobility of trees and stones. »»

A French fraternity

If Hokusai benefited from the 1820s from a learned reception in Europe, it was in fact mainly in France that his work met a fraternal reception. The engraver Félix Bracquemond would have fallen in 1856. at the printer Delâtre, on a small album with red cover, “one of the volumes of the Mangwamafrom Hok ‘Saï. »»

Claude Monet had a meeting that was to inspire it asceep in painter hokusai icon france before the same year:

“My real discovery of Japan, the purchase of my first prints, dates from 1856. I was sixteen! I unearthed them in Le Havre, in a shop as there were once where the curiosities reported by long-haul […]. Additionally, I paid them twenty under room. It seems that today some would sell thousands of francs. »»

From the end of the 1850s. Hokusai therefore appeared as a distant precursor who reinforced the conviction of the first fans of prints, passionate about etchings, caricatures and these popular illuminations soon praised by Arthur Rimbaud in A season in hell.

A letter from Charles Baudelaire. apostle of modernity, which preferred the “brutal and enormous magic” of the dioramas, true by their very falsehood, with realistic representations, testifies in 1862 of this early recognition:

“A long time ago, I received a package of Japonneries that I shared between my friends and friends. I had reserved you [sic] These three. […] They are not bad (Images of Epinal of Japan, 2 pieces room in Yeddo). I assure you that, on vellum and painter hokusai icon france before framed by bamboo or vermilion baguettes, it is a great effect. »»

Painter hokusai icon france before

Hokusai the inspiration

The most spiritual tribute to Hokusai came from the illustrator Henri Rivière who. between 1888 and 1902, Grava The thirty-six views of the Eiffel Tower. It was not. as Christine Guth, an American specialist in the Edo period, said, of “putting in parallel the natural sublimity of Mount Fuji and the technological sublimity of the Eiffel Tower”-postulate denied by the accent put on the Paris of the suburbs and the industry, as well as by Rivière itself, which explicitly insisted in its memories of the parodic aspect of its company:

“I had composed […] Drawings for an image book […] who seemed later in lithography; It was the “thirty-six views of the Eiffel Tower”, reminiscence of the title of Hokusai: “The thirty-six views of the Fujiyama”, but, as Arsène painter hokusai icon france before Alexandre says in the preface he wrote for these views of Paris: “We have the Fujiyama that one can”. »»

As should noted in 1914 the great art historian Henri Focillon. in the monograph he devoted to the Japanese master, these “artists who, having found in [Hokusai] A model and an example, cherish it, not only for the rare and superior charm of his mastery, but for the authority he conferred on their own aesthetics ”. Hokusai did not influence French painters in no way, as we read too often: he confirmed and encouraged their audacity.