After the opening of economic and cultural trade between Japan and Europe and the United States in 1854, a predominant view of Japanese art and culture as fundamentally different from their European equivalents began to dominate nineteenth-century European commentaries. For example, in an 1867 article, Zacharie Astruc spoke of "this Orient, so different from us." Japan's difference was exactly what made it so exciting to Astruc, who was enthusiastic about the "new inspiration" that could be drawn from "this far away people."¹ In 1868, Jules Champfleury agreed on the essential difference of Japanese art, but he condemned the growing fascination with its "bizarre use of color," as he described the impact of James McNeil Whistler's enthusiasm for Japanese lacquer-ware and kimonos. He argued that the American artist made paintings "so bizarre that they troubled the eyes of the naïve men who sought positions on...exhibition juries."² Champfleury ultimately feared that France was "threatened with a Japanese invasion in painting."³ These positions reflect what Gabriel P. Weisberg has described as a dualism between two quickly emerging camps: those who feared Japanese influence and those who embraced its potentially liberating aesthetic.⁴ Regardless of whether European critics liked or disliked Japanese art, however, their comments presupposed Japanese exoticism and difference.⁵

While the common view of Japan was one of exoticism and difference, this outlook was not shared by all. Edmond de Goncourt (fig. 1) stood out among commentators on Japan for repeatedly asserting formal and social similarities between its culture and that of France.⁶ Japan struck him not only by its difference, but also by its sameness. Both France and Japan, in his view, were countries with a waning aristocratic culture that had reached its purest expression in the eighteenth century. He felt strongly that the best artists from both nations were not those who adhered to official schools and lifeless academic formulas, but rather those whose art captured and celebrated the daily lives and vitality of their most refined and beautiful people. Goncourt praised Utamaro and Hokusai for Japan; Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard for France.

The parallels Goncourt drew between French and Japanese art were almost always qualified however. In spite of Japan’s similarities, it could never be completely assimilated into a French model. This essay will examine Goncourt’s construction of both similarity and difference. My goal is not to ascertain whether France and Japan “really were” alike or unlike, but rather to question the motivations that inspired assertions of similarity or difference. Relationships of analogy and contrast pepper Edmond de Goncourt’s various writings about Japan to such an extent that it becomes difficult to ascertain whether he ultimately agreed with his contemporaries about Japan’s exoticism. Given this ambiguity, I will explore how the analogies and contrasts functioned together as new arguments in support of Edmond de Goncourt’s long-held (and frequently attacked) aesthetic positions, which primarily concerned France and not Japan. In order to fully understand his analogies, we must place them into the context of French aesthetic debates, rather than merely dismiss them as inaccurate, fanciful, or wrong about Japan and its artistic culture.⁷ Goncourt’s preferred aesthetic criteria were increasingly being sidelined in both contemporary avant-garde painting and in the art critical and art historical literature of the period. His writing on Japanese art therefore attempted to reinforce the value of aesthetic qualities he felt were neglected or unrecognized by his contemporaries. Far from a simple, uncomplicated “passion for” Japanese art, Edmond de Goncourt’s embrace of it reflected a diverse range of personal and socio-cultural interests.⁸

Among Japonisme scholars, Edmond de Goncourt is most notorious for his repeated and insistent claims that he and his brother Jules were the first Europeans to recognize the artistic interest of Japanese prints in the early 1850s.⁹ While this claim has since been thoroughly debunked,¹⁰ the Goncourt brothers certainly belonged to the earliest group of French men fascinated by Japanese art and culture in the early 1860s. Twenty years later, Edmond’s book on his house, La Maison d’un artiste, published in 1881, dedicated long passages to descriptions of his collection of Japanese prints, Chinese porcelains, and other East Asian decorative arts, helping to diffuse the taste for Japanese objects as part of an aesthetic interior (fig. 2).¹¹

Goncourt can rightfully claim primacy for other ventures: in 1891, he published the first art historical monograph on Kitagawa Utamaro, followed in 1896 by one on Katsushika Hokusai.¹² At the time of publication, these two books were the only comprehensively researched monographs on any Japanese artist available in any language, and were intended to open a series of twelve more individual studies left incomplete at Edmond’s death in 1896.¹³ Goncourt’s fame as a Japoniste¹⁴ increased posthumously with the highly publicized sale of his collection of Asian and French art, the proceeds of which founded the Académie Goncourt.¹⁵

Since Edmond never traveled to the Far East,¹⁶ his remarks pertain to the works of art he studied and collected, and to the Japanese people that he encountered in Paris. He had many sources for learning about Japanese art, perhaps none more important than Hayashi Tadamasa, a Japanese dealer living in Paris and one of Goncourt’s primary interlocutors. Hayashi was a tremendously important figure in the transmission, popularization, and diffusion of Japanese art and culture in Europe. He first came to Paris in 1878 as a salesperson and interpreter for the largest Japanese export company, Kiryo Kosho Kaisha (Kiryo Crafts & Trading Company), which supplied goods to the Japanese pavilion at that year’s World’s Fair.¹⁷ He stayed to sell the remaining merchandise once the fair closed, and eventually went on to become, with Siegfried Bing, one of the pre-eminent dealers of Japanese art in Paris.

Goncourt and Hayashi came into contact through the enthusiastic and competitive Parisian milieu of Japonisants, meeting for the first time at a dinner at Philippe Burty’s house on November 28, 1878.¹⁸ In addition to these social settings, which also had political and commercial overtones, Goncourt regularly frequented Hayashi in his salesroom, eventually befriending him and working closely with him on the preparation of his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai.¹⁹ Edmond’s studied and self-conscious erudition allowed him to display his vast connoisseurial knowledge of art from a range of countries and periods by drawing from a wide field of comparative material. I sense that, going beyond obvious comparisons, he sought to surprise and trump even his most aesthetically well-versed readers with witty and unexpected analogies, always keeping the upper hand in a game of visual one-upmanship. The comparisons to eighteenth-century art, his area of expertise, were a way of placing his intellectual signature on the books.

Long before Edmond met Hayashi, however, he and his brother Jules began to make connections between Japanese and French culture.²⁰ Edmond and Jules had the opportunity to see Japanese ink drawings (as opposed to the more common prints) firsthand in the Siebold collection in Leiden in 1861. Comparing the drawings favorably to sketches by Fragonard, the Goncourts first established parallels between these two cultures by claiming that the Japanese drawings “have the wit and picturesque touch of an ink drawing by Fragonard.”²¹ Three years later, they insisted that Japanese prints and paintings by Watteau were both “drawn from the intimate study of nature,” and argued that, in spite of their fanciful appearance to European eyes, Japanese prints were based on observation and rendered “what the Japanese artists saw.”²² Edmond ultimately described Utamaro as the “Watteau of over there,”²³ because both artists exhibited a sustained preference for female subjects. The phrase le Watteau de là-bas at once asserted an equivalency that characterized the Japanese artist using a French artist’s name, while at the same time underscoring his geographic distance. Crucial elements of Goncourt’s comparative criteria thus take shape: wit and art based in the direct observation of reality that transcribes life “as it was lived.”

These generalizing comparisons sometimes grow particular with comments made about specific works of art. Edmond described a woman running from a sudden rainstorm in an Utamaro print as having, “the pretty momentum of the statue of Atalante in the Tuileries garden (figs. 3 & 4),”²⁴ while he noticed that a Japanese god named Hoteï drawn by Hokusai juggles a Japanese boy on his feet “as in the Gimblette by Fragonard.”²⁵ Both of these comparisons turn on the coincidental formal similarities of pose and action without asserting anything deeper about Japanese or French character. In both of these examples, natural movement and playfulness united the works as expressions of human vitality. By focusing on shared subjects and formal qualities in Japanese and French art, Goncourt “Frenchified” Japanese artists and their work.

Edmond took the French frame of reference for Japanese art to an extreme in La Maison d’un artiste, where, in dating a Japanese bronze of 1783 from the Cernuschi collection, he used French historical periods rather than Japanese ones: “And to what period does the bronze statue of Ban Kurobioe by Murata Shosaburo Kunihissa…belong? To late Louis XVI, [or] perhaps from the period of the Directory.”²⁶ The Edo period statue in fact derives from one of the most stable eras in Japanese history,²⁷ the contrary of French upheavals during the same time, and the terms Louis XVI or Directory thus had no validity in relation to the periodization of Japanese art. Seeing Japanese art through eyes deeply familiar with eighteenth-century France caused Edmond to find connections in surprising places, and he clearly situated the Japanese work in a French frame of reference, presumably familiar to his readers.

When Goncourt was not comparing specific works of art to each other, he frequently used the exact same vocabulary to describe eighteenth-century French and Japanese art. Compare, for example, his description of what he saw as the typical way Hokusai represented the female body around 1804: “a gracious little elongated woman…with cute features…an elegant type of woman, fluid;”²⁸ with this description of a statuette in his collection attributed to Clodion: “a young woman, a little bit lanky, with long thighs, cute thin thighs…in her elongated grace.”²⁹ A similar linguistic parallelism marked his characterizations of Hokusai and Chardin,³⁰ in which both artists were praised for their fire and for their genius that expressed itself instinctually from the first brushstroke or drawn line and that captured the life, vitality, and movement of their subjects. In spite of the thirty years that separated the two texts, Edmond returned to the same vocabulary he had used to defend French eighteenth-century art to write about Japanese art. He legitimized the newly discovered art through the weight of his work on the past, and reinforced and confirmed the value of that earlier position by identifying a similar current in another culture. The arts of the two nations seem to play a mutually reinforcing role in Edmond’s writing of the 1880s and 90s.

In addition to using a strikingly similar vocabulary to praise eighteenth-century French art and Japanese art, Goncourt also traced the same historical trajectory for the arts of both nations. He located a pure expression of Japanese art in the eighteenth century between an earlier period of Chinese influence on Japan and the later modernization undertaken with the advent of the Meiji empire.³¹ That this period coincided with his sense of French art reaching its purest expression in the eighteenth century only played into his nostalgia for a lost era of French essences, destroyed by the Revolution and the crass taste of the bourgeois governments that replaced the ancien régime. Hokusai therefore played a significant role in Goncourt’s understanding of the Japanese canon because he was the first artist, in Edmond’s mind, to have thrown off the mantle of Chinese influence and express an essentially national Japanese style.³²

This reading of Hokusai’s place in Japanese art history resonated with arguments Edmond and Jules had made in the 1860s about eighteenth-century artists. Edmond’s discussions of Japanese art in terms borrowed from his earlier analyses of French art participated then in his ongoing campaign to reposition the values of eighteenth-century French art at the center of French art history. Goncourt’s vision of the historical arc of that history was marked by a period of lost essences, corresponding to the eighteenth century, that was corrupted by the modernizing forces unleashed by the French Revolution.³³ This position was increasingly at odds with the histories of French art emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century, which placed the French “golden age” either in the seventeenth century or in the Neoclassical school of David and Ingres.³⁴ The art of the early eighteenth century was either overlooked or treated as frivolous, decadent, or both, and was rarely evoked as a model to be followed in the way that Poussin and other academicians were.³⁵ Edmond opened his book on Hokusai with the lament: “In the two hemispheres, then, there is the same injustice for any independent talent from the past!”³⁶ The language he used to contrast Hokusai—lively, passionate, original—with the academic painters of the Tosa school—pompous artificiality, precious conventions, imitators, idealists—took up once again the battle he and his brother had waged against the French academy.³⁷ In both countries, the brothers were drawn to neglected, scorned artists, and used them to critique the very institutions that rejected them.³⁸

The best methodological tool for countering that neglect was the legitimizing format of the monograph. Goncourt’s overall method for interpreting Japanese art thus also extended patterns he established with his brother in their writing on eighteenth-century French art. Edmond’s choice to write individual monographs on single “great” artists, rather than a general history of the art of Japan, repeated the formula he had already used twenty years earlier for eighteenth-century French artists.³⁹ His monographs included the juxtaposition of flowery descriptive passages written in what the brothers called their écriture artiste⁴⁰ with drier, journalistic reporting on the facts and dates of the artist’s life. Given that biography since Vasari remained the predominant mode of art historical writing, the very fact of writing a biographical book on an artist conferred significant status on the subject as worthy of such treatment. Edmond was certainly aware of this connection. In yet another of his East-West comparisons, he called Hokusai’s native biographers “Japanese Vasaris.”⁴¹

Goncourt’s predilection for reading both French and Japanese genre scenes as direct documents of daily life represents another shared methodology in his approach to the arts of the two countries.⁴² In the prefaces to their books Les Maîtresses de Louis XV (1860) and La Femme au dix-huitième siècle (1862), the Goncourts made a systematic case about images as a documentary source for learning about eighteenth-century French life. There, they argued that written documents were not enough for historians to capture the object of their studies “from life…while it’s hot.”⁴³ They repeatedly used genre prints as historical evidence, mining their content for information about hairstyles, changes in fashion, and social custom. The same language about “seizing” their subjects from life arose in Edmond’s discussion of Japanese artists.⁴⁴ Many times, Goncourt slipped from talking about the art to talking about society, as if the former were a transparent reflection of the latter, and claimed, for example, that Hokusai’s illustrations for the novel Yéhon Tamano Otiho (String of Pearls Fallen to the Earth) included “a number of important drawings for this history of Japanese customs, drawings of the most absolute reality.”⁴⁵ By grounding their defense of eighteenth-century artists in France and Japan in an ideology of transcribed reality, the Goncourts countered what they saw as academic tendencies towards stilted, lifeless, formulaic, and idea-based art.⁴⁶

Edmond de Goncourt’s detailed characterization of Utamaro’s and Hokusai’s talents therefore praised them according to the values he and his brother Jules had already admired in eighteenth-century French art. He prefaced his monograph on Utamaro saying that the eighteenth century was a human century in both Japan and France,⁴⁷ echoing the brothers’ desire to write a new, human form of history in the 1860s.⁴⁸ According to Goncourt, the humanity of the eighteenth-century in both Japan and France was communicated in the arts through a vital energy that seemed to bring the works of art to life, and he claimed that artists from both places literally captured life itself in the paper of the print.⁴⁹ In his assessment, both countries shared a highly aestheticized, aristocratic culture that privileged beauty in even the smallest aspects of everyday life. They also shared a refined culture of female prostitution, a range of subjects relating to the intimate lives of women, and an exacting study of nature combined with a high degree of fantasy and imagination. These issues arise as major themes in the monographs that make up the Goncourts’ L’Art du dix-huitième siècle, and can also be found throughout Outamaro and Hokousaï.⁵⁰ The Goncourts’ collection contained both French and Japanese objects that once belonged to nobles or otherwise served as traces of a lost aristocratic way of life, and Goncourt highlighted the fact that French aristocratic collections in the eighteenth century also included Japanese objects.⁵¹ This interlocking network of analogies, which range from individual works of art to historiographic and methodological questions, deeply bound the arts of the two countries together in Edmond’s Japonisme. When presenting his work to French readers, Edmond drew on his established reputation as a scholar and lover of eighteenth-century culture to make claims about Japan that would resonate with his audience. The analogies served a variety of goals or functions, to which I now turn.

One way to understand Goncourt’s analogies is to see them as a way to introduce the new and unfamiliar by means of the familiar. Goncourt’s comparisons presented Japanese art in terms that were known to his French readers, helping them to organize and understand new material. For example, the Frenchman indicated the relative size of some Hokusai drawings from 1794 by saying that they were, “the size of our playing cards.”⁵² Scientists who work on cognition have studied how the eye and brain draw rapid conclusions based on comparing incoming stimuli to previous experiences stored in the visual cortex. When looking at a new work of art, for example, David Perkins has described how: “Our eyes and minds reach a cascade of intuitive conclusions by some kind of rapid silent integration of evidence. This experiencing [of a work of art] depends, in turn, on prior experiences.”⁵³ In the nineteenth-century, cognition was also understood as a form of comparison to known things. In 1867, Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXè siècle suggested that: “Resemblance and dissemblance are…two aspects through which the nature of objects present themselves to the intellect that observes and compares them.”⁵⁴ Larousse further naturalized the comparative reflex as one of the “primary and fundamental operations” of cognitive reasoning. The comparative method informed nineteenth-century scientific discourses of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, which were all based on concepts of likeness and difference, and it also stood at the heart of the emerging discipline of art history.⁵⁵ If we think of comparison as the primary means of processing new sensory input from the world, we might be tempted to conclude that the Goncourts’ analogies between French and Japanese art were simply evidence of these mental processes.

Such a conclusion, however, would only be a partial explanation of what was at stake in the analogies, and would miss their deeper symbolic and rhetorical functions as they related to Edmond’s positions in the aesthetic debates of late nineteenth-century France. Whatever else Edmond’s motivation, one of the goals of his writing was to train European viewers to see and appreciate the subtle beauty of Japanese art.⁵⁶ In order to explore the way Goncourt’s comparisons actively participated in establishing or confirming his aesthetic positions, it is helpful to examine another group of analogies. Goncourt identified a wide variety of formal affinities between Japanese and European art, not all of which had to do with eighteenth-century France.⁵⁷ Of the non-French comparisons, the most interesting in terms of their ideological function are the parallels he constructed with Italian Renaissance art. Hokusai’s nudes, he claimed, “have something of a Mantegna,”⁵⁸ (figs. 5 & 6) and Utamaro’s nursing mothers evoked images of the Virgin Mary bending towards the infant Christ in Renaissance Madonnas (figs. 7 & 8).⁵⁹ Often, the comparisons took on a surprising, even shocking, allure. The hand of a masturbating woman in a Hokusai print had the “indescribable voluptuousness, […] the floating elegance of a hand by Primaticcio.”⁶⁰ The “force” and “power” of the linearity of phalluses in Japanese erotic prints “equaled” Michelangelo’s drawing of a hand, owned by the Louvre (figs. 9 & 10).⁶¹ In these comparisons to Italian art⁶²—rarer than the eighteenth-century French references—Goncourt may have taken a certain delight in the quasi-blasphemous surprise generated by his juxtapositions.

The extremism of these examples demonstrates how Edmond borrowed familiar names and established categories, only to undermine them. The most shocking comparisons, such as that of anonymous, pornographic prints to a work by one of the most revered geniuses of the Western canon, called into question the authority of the academic value system that would place Michelangelo at the apogee of the philosophical category “Art.”⁶³ The Goncourt brothers’ rejection of the French academic system and the canon of masterpieces it generated is well known,⁶⁴ but the extent to which Edmond’s later embrace of Japanese art participated in that critique has heretofore gone unexamined. I am arguing here that Edmond mobilized Japanese art as yet another display of that system’s limitations. One symbolic goal of the analogies between Japanese and European art, then, was a critique of academic definitions of high art.

Given this anti-academic stance, it might seem paradoxical that the comparisons nonetheless elevated the newly discovered Japanese work into the category of “Art.” As we have already seen, the monographic format made this claim implicitly, but Edmond also raised the question explicitly in his monograph on Hokusai, writing repeatedly on how his work was not recognized as art, even in his own country.⁶⁵ Edmond even visually stressed the artistic claims he made by italicizing the word in places where he consciously sought to elevate visual forms outside his culture’s accepted category of fine art. Thus, in Outamaro, he wrote of the fabric colors of kimonos as “the most artistic,” and exclaimed over the beauty and seductive charm of works on paper, calling them “art prints.”⁶⁶ Such an emphasis served as a means to defend the aesthetic (as opposed to merely commercial or decorative) value of Japanese art.⁶⁷ On the one hand, Edmond wanted to denigrate what he saw as the stultified academicism that increasingly limited the scope of art. On the other, he borrowed its vocabulary and methods to legitimize his interest in objects that did not appear to many nineteenth-century viewers as belonging to the realm of the fine arts, even if they admired other characteristics about it.⁶⁸

We need to be careful here, however. The art praised by the Goncourts derived from the eighteenth-century artisan traditions wherein, as Debora Silverman has discussed, the word art pertained to the skillful execution of talent, applied to a great variety of media—from furniture to decorative paintings, from jewelry to book illustration, from porcelain to prints.⁶⁹ These were not the forms recognized as great by the Academy, which preferred grand history paintings and portraits of noble men. The innovation of the brothers’ earlier defense of eighteenth-century French drawings and applied and decorative arts, which relocated greatness into arenas of cultural production normally shunned by the powerful institutions of the French art world, was to apply the academy’s language of visionary talent and original, independent genius to these products. By identifying another culture with a similar artistic profile to his beloved eighteenth-century France, Edmond not only added credence to his previously established position on the superiority and essential Frenchness of eighteenth-century art, but he also created an aesthetic frame in which Japanese objects could be appreciated as art.

We are free, of course, to agree or disagree with both the accuracy and the appropriateness of Edmond’s comparisons, but the trend—hardly unique to Goncourt—to see Japanese art through the lens of European art can also be identified in other writers, in spite of the suppositions of exoticism and difference.⁷⁰ Louis Gonse, a specialist in medieval art and author of the first general history of Japanese art, published in 1883, tended to make comparisons between Japanese art and French medieval art.⁷¹ Moreover, Gonse concentrated on older Japanese art, compared to Edmond, who favored the art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Philippe Burty, Ernest Chesneau, and Zacharie Astruc, all defenders of Impressionism, filtered their discussions of Japanese art through their allegiances to nineteenth-century French art.⁷² Each person, in constructing a version of Japanese art, built a frame informed by his previous training and found the Japanese art that corresponded to a pre-existing taste. Taken as a repeated pattern, the analogies point to a nationalized reading of Japanese art, and ironically in most cases, the nation most at stake was not Japan, but France.

The similarities that Goncourt described did not completely cancel the notion of differences between Japanese and European art. Like many of his contemporaries, Edmond de Goncourt did sometimes characterize Japanese art as exotic and different. But differences, too, can be shown to have taken a part in Edmond’s larger goals in writing about Japanese art. Careful study of the grammar he used to create his parallels reveals that he often placed limits on the analogies in such a way as to preserve a sense of distance between Japanese and European art. Many of the comparisons are couched in terms of a Japanese work being “not unlike,” or having “something of,” “a link to,” “a little bit of” the characteristics of a Western work. His comment on an 1804 print by Hokusai is typical of this formulation: “a curious still life recalling a little bit of the simplicity of subjects treated by Chardin.”⁷³ Something about the still life called Chardin to mind, but by qualifying the comparison with the limiting phrase “a little bit,” Edmond kept the two artists in different realms.

In another instance, writing about Hokusai’s 1818 illustrations for Denshin Gakyo (Mirror of Pictures Transmitted from the Soul), Goncourt first created a parallel with Michelangelo: “First the title page in a handsome Michelangelesque frame.” Hokusai’s decorative frame was further described as: “a frame that has the air of the first page of one of our fine books from the sixteenth century.”⁷⁴ No specific book is mentioned, no specific example of a frame by Michelangelo is offered as evidence. The analogy turns on Michelangelo and Hokusai having a vague, common “air.”⁷⁵ A general similarity is asserted without ever being explained. Vague or limiting qualifiers allowed Edmond to back away from particulars, to suggest similarity and, at the same time, to avoid the suggestion of absolute resemblance. By preferring these imprecise terms, Edmond created a general network of comparisons between Japanese and European art that relied more on feeling and supposition than concrete examples. Thus, by not specifying what drew him to make the comparison, by not specifying an image in which the highlighted feature can be found, Goncourt ultimately left room for differences between Japanese and French art.

Sometimes this difference was discussed openly, rather than being couched in qualified comparisons. The opening chapter of La Maison d’un artiste welcomed the reader/visitor into the vestibule decorated with Japanese silk embroideries and other Asian objects, which Edmond described as “bizarre, unexpected, astonishing in their originality and their exoticism.”⁷⁶ Edmond also described how he used contrasts between Asian and French objects to create visual interest in his rooms.⁷⁷ Often, when looking at a Japanese art object he observed a feature that led him to make a generalizing and stereotypical character assessment of all Japanese people as different from Europeans. For example, when Goncourt looked at Japanese sword-guards (fig. 11), he was struck by the visible attention to minute detail and artistry of the metalwork, and he concluded that: “The Japanese, in their attention to and observation of nature, are amused by smaller incidents than we, we other Europeans.”⁷⁸ The stark simplicity of the “to be” verb (Japanese…are amused) lent a timeless universality to the claim, transforming it into an essential “truth” that did not evolve over time.⁷⁹

Difference between European and Japanese artists was stated even more starkly in 1885: “We Europeans only like our plastic arts to represent superior animality: the ferocious, the horse, the dog. Our artists don’t have the sort of tenderness that inspires Asian artists to lovingly draw the animal, and all animals, the most vile, the most humble, the most despised: the toad for example.”⁸⁰ These statements play into a central art historical problem that is more familiar when applied to individuals. What is the relationship between an artwork and its creator? Romantic critics and historians argued that individuals express themselves in works of art, that the object can be a conduit to the artist’s personality. Edmond was not alone in broadening this idea from the particular of the individual to the broader realm of national character.

In this we can see Goncourt operating within the climate of positivism, which encouraged the interpretation of art in nationalistic terms. Whether they established similarities or differences, Edmond de Goncourt’s comparisons derived from nineteenth-century positivist assumptions that works of art were intimately related to the national character of the people who created them. This idea, present already in the thinking of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, developed in the nineteenth-century work of men such as Arthur Gobineau, a propagandist for the inequality of the races, Ernest Renan, a linguist and archaeologist concerned with race and era, and Hippolyte Taine, who laid out the theoretical principles of this approach to art.⁸¹ In Taine’s theory, national character was formed through a combination of geographic, climactic, and cultural influences, and served as the basis of racial determinism in artistic production. Each nation or race developed a distinct temperament and identity that informed all of its cultural production, and the study of art objects could therefore lead to a profound understanding of the character of a nation because, in Taine’s words, there exists “an exact correspondence between a work and its milieu.”⁸² Taine’s theories of national character and the role it played in artistic production profoundly influenced the nineteenth-century articulation of national schools and styles, and served as the fundamental theoretical framework for the emerging disciplines of art history.⁸³

Like most nineteenth-century writers on art, the Goncourt brothers’ books and essays reflect this bias towards racialized ethnographic theories. The brothers knew Taine personally, first mentioning him in their Journal in January 1862.⁸⁴ They dined regularly with him at the Magny dinners—named after the restaurant where men including Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Taine, the Goncourts, Renan, Flaubert, Turgenev, and others met every two weeks—that took place between 1862 and 1874. They had ample opportunity to discuss art and aesthetics with him and reported frequently on the intellectual debates that took place at the restaurant. Generally suspicious of university professors, whom they saw as lacking experience in the real world, the Goncourts, at least in the Journal, remained critical of Taine’s ideas: “Taine claimed that talented men are the products of their milieu. [Théophile] Gautier and we, we claimed the contrary, that they are exceptions.”⁸⁵ Given the “Tainean” flavor of the Goncourts’ writing on French and Japanese national characteristics, however, these criticisms must be understood as part of a culture of debate and argument. The Goncourts had clearly absorbed the fundamental notion that works of art could reveal national character.⁸⁶

Much of the Goncourt brothers’ writing about art attempted to define the essence of Frenchness. The eighteenth century, “the French century par excellence,”⁸⁷ according to the brothers, dominated their historical research and publishing for over ten years. As in Taine’s theory, the Goncourts attributed the roots of this Frenchness to the soil itself, evident in their essay on Fragonard.⁸⁸ They also remarked in the Journal that three great eighteenth-century artists, Watteau, Chardin, and La Tour, never traveled to Italy—intimating that they were free from foreign influence.⁸⁹ The Goncourts were not alone in attempting to locate the essence of Frenchness in an artistic style or period. Their research should be considered in parallel to the work of Viollet-le-Duc, for example, who located a remarkably similar essential Frenchness in the medieval Gothic, or Charles Blanc, whose monumental Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, published in fourteen volumes between 1861–69, judged artists based on their adherence to national styles.⁹⁰ For all of these authors, a nation expressed something of its essential character through the arts.

Many statements in Goncourt’s monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai reflected this tendency to nationalize their artistic production. At times, Goncourt asserted that an artist’s work was typical of the way all Japanese artists represented a given subject. Hokusai’s caricatural drawing style thus was not “unique to Hokusai, but almost standard in all Japanese painters.”⁹¹ Although he never used geographical or climactic arguments in speaking of Japanese art, Goncourt nevertheless made numerous references to “Japanese character,” or spoke in an essentializing way about how “the Japanese” thought or acted.⁹² So while Edmond clearly applied positivist thinking to Japanese identity, he never locked it into a straightforward relationship with a similarly essentialized French identity. At times, the two could be made to converge, and at others they could be made to diverge.

The positivist thinking that lead nineteenth-century authors to speak confidently of racial or national characteristics was most visible then in Edmond’s declarations of difference between Europe and Japan. Beneath them, I again sense his anti-academicism. His comments on the fine detail in the metalwork of sword-guards and the loving tenderness with which Japanese artists depicted even the most humble animals praised qualities opposed to the monumental and the noble advocated by the academy. These aspects of French academic theory and practice repeatedly drew the Goncourts’ ridicule. The differences Edmond identified between Europe and Japan participated therefore in his broader goal of delegitimizing academic values. We are left with an unstable picture of Japanese art, both like and unlike French art. What remained constant was the denigration of academic values and the tendency to extrapolate national character from the evidence of artworks.

In their book Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914, June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam argued that: “Stylistic options…could become heavily freighted with ideological meaning as historians, critics, and political theorists elaborated cultural genealogies in which supposedly fundamental national characteristics were invested in particular poetic traditions and plastic forms…Both scholarly and popular art-historical texts of the early Third Republic demonstrate a widespread impulse to essentialize cultural remains in the pursuit of an authoritative vision of Frenchness.”⁹³ The authors of the various essays in the book focus on French art and the nationalist discourses that surrounded it, exploring tensions between regional differences and their relationship to the nation as a whole. As I have argued here, Edmond de Goncourt’s writing on Japanese art and culture participated in this articulation of Frenchness via the analogies and contrasts he identified between Japan and France. But, as we have seen, Goncourt’s sense of Frenchness differed from that of his contemporaries. Just as nationalism itself is a diverse, multi-faceted phenomenon, so Edmond de Goncourt’s categories of resemblance and difference served a variety of needs, from the cognitive to the symbolic; from the aesthetic to the ideological. Comparison, we might say, cannot exist without contrast, and studying the dialectical movement between the two permits the rhetorical nature of such exercises to rise to the surface.

In his writings, Goncourt presented an unstable vision of Japanese art in support of aesthetic positions in debates taking place in France. The study of Japanese people and art provided him with arguments in his critique of a French system that was moving increasingly away from the values of aristocratic refinement and eroticized elegance that he cherished in the eighteenth century. His articulations of similarity and difference—and indeed, the co-existence of both analogies and contrasts in much Japoniste discourse—should alert us to the constructed nature of each, and cause us to question the rhetorical or ideological goals behind their implementation.