This thesis examines the British perception of Japanese art from the 1890s to the 1930s. There has been a body of works on Japonisme, the phenomenon which is generally acknowledged as the western interest in and adoption of elements from
Japanese art, focusing especially on the period from the 1860s to the 1880s. Also, the ways in which Japanese art and the ‘history of Japanese art were constructed to be presented to a western audience by the Japanese government around the turn of the century as part of the process of Japan s modernisation and westernisation has been thoroughly investigated in the fields of Japanese art history and Japanese history. However, the following issues still need to be addressed. Firstly, how western audiences actually responded to the above mentioned Japanese government s representation of Japanese art has not been adequately examined. Secondly, Japonisme after around the turn of the century has been a neglected field of research in the previous studies. This thesis considers these issues by investigating how Japanese art was perceived in Britain, as affected by the changing British and Japanese contexts from the 1890s to the 1930s.

As a case study of the first issue, this thesis investigates the representation of ‘Japanese art’ at the Japan-British Exhibition, London, 1910, and the British response to it. From around the turn of the century, the Japanese government began to present what they regarded as ‘authentic ‘Japanese art as distinct from what had been envisaged as ‘Japanese art’ by westerners in the fashion for Japonisme in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Japan-British Exhibition was the first opportunity to show this government representation of Japanese art to a British audience on a major scale. However, the British audience did not respond to it as the Japanese government expected and hoped, and instead picked up certain aspects that would justify their current aesthetic ideas - such as the then emerging modernism and primitivism.

In order to address the second issue, this thesis also looks at the reception of Japanese prints and printmaking in Britain. Ukiyo-e prints, which became immensely popular in the West from the 1860s, were virtually excluded from the Japanese governments discourse on ‘Japanese art. However, it was this officially neglected branch of Japanese art that continued to be appreciated in Britain, even after the general craze for things Japanese faded away around the turn of the century. Moreover, although it has been pointed out in many of the studies on Japonisme that western artists introduced elements of ukiyo-e like motifs, subjects and compositional devices in the nineteenth century, the period after the 1890s saw the emergence of a new group of British artists who adopted other aspects of ukiyo-e prints - they were the woodcut and linocut printmakers who produced prints, using the traditional ukiyo-e printmaking techniques, tools and materials.

There were two backgrounds which prompted these artists and designers to adopt the Japanese method of printmaking. One was the development of the studies on Japanese prints and printmaking in Britain from the 1880s onwards. These studies, which developed in accordance with the accumulation of Japanese prints in major museums, offered not only the valuable source of information about various aspects of Japanese prints but also the view in which Japanese printmaking was seen as embodying the Arts and Crafts ideas — such as truth to materials, artist-craftsmanship and ‘art for the people. Another background was the artistic revival of printmaking in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In this revival, William Morris, the influential figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and his followers opened the way to promote woodblock printing as original expression by artist-craftsmen. Encouraged by these backgrounds, some British artists began to produce woodcut prints using the Japanese method in order to achieve the Arts and Crafts ideas from the 1890s and disseminated Japanese techniques through teaching at major art schools. In the 1920s and 1930s, not only woodcut printmakers but
also linocut printmakers adopted some Japanese printmaking techniques. Moreover, these woodcut and linocut printmakers promoted their prints by associating them with the factors which had special significance in the inter-war years — the notions of ‘Englishness’ and ‘modernity and the general rise in interest in home ownership and domestic interior. By examining how Japanese prints and printmaking continued to be appreciated and appropriated in Britain in these changing contexts from the 1890s to the 1930s, this thesis aims to shed a new light on second-stage Japonisme in Britain.

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