Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 9781409437765, 2012049668

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
A Concise Review of Studies of Western Collections and Museums
Notes
1 The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition
Nineteenth-Century Asian Travel Accounts of Europe
Japanese Travel Accounts
Chinese Travel Writing
Notes
2 Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Cernuschi’s Collection and Reappraisals of Europe and Asia
A Fresh Approach to the Musée Cernuschi
A Profile of Cernuschi
Manifold Impressions of Japan and China
Conditions of Collecting
Metals and Global Monetary Histories
Contact and Historiography
Shifting Frames of Interpretation in Europe
Shifting Frames of Interpretation in Asia
Conclusion
Notes
3 The Labor of Travel: Guimet and Régamey in Asia
Travel and Representation
Notes
4 Equivalence and Inversion: France, Japan, and China in Goncourt’s Cabinet
Collection and Dissolution
Literary Scholarship on Goncourt
Theory and Practice: A Collection Within a Collection
The Market for Asian Objects
Functions of Chinoiserie
Functions of Asia
Goncourt’s Polymorphic Narratives
Desire and Fantasy
Collections and Museums
Display
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

travel, collecting, and museums of asian art in nineteenth-century paris Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship— the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi’s collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet’s museum of religious objects and Goncourt’s private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories. Ting Chang teaches art history at the University of Nottingham. She has published in The Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, Les Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, and many other volumes.

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions from 1700 to 1950. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. HMCC takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich field of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. HMCC therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. It encompasses the following areas of concern: 1. Material culture in its broadest dimension, including the high arts of painting and sculpture, the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, etc.), and everyday objects of all kinds. 2. Collecting practices, be they institutionalized activities associated with museums, governmental authorities, and religious entities, or collecting done by individuals and social groups. 3. The role of objects in defining self, community, and difference in an increasingly international and globalized world, with cross-cultural exchange and travel the central modes of object transfer. 4. Objects as constitutive of historical narratives, be they devised by historical figures seeking to understand their past or in the form of modern scholarly narratives. The series publishes interdisciplinary and comparative research on objects that addresses one or more of these perspectives and includes monographs, thematic studies, and edited volumes of essays.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris Ting Chang

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Ting Chang 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ting Chang has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chang, Ting. Travel, collecting, and museums of Asian art in nineteenth-century Paris. – (The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950) 1. Art, Asian – Collectors and collecting – Europe – History – 19th century. 2. Art objects, Asian – Collectors and collecting – Europe – History – 19th century. 3. Cernuschi, Henri, 1821-1896 – Art collections. 4. Guimet, Emile, 1836–1918 – Art collections. 5. Goncourt, Edmond de, 1822–1896 – Art collections. 6. Art museums – France – Paris – History – 19th century. 7. Europeans – Travel – Asia – History – 19th century. 8. Asians – Travel – Europe – History – 19th century. 9. Intercultural communication in art – History – 19th century. 10. East and West – History – 19th century. I. Title II. Series 709.5’0744436–dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Chang, Ting Travel, collecting, and museums of Asian art in nineteenth-century Paris / by Ting Chang. pages cm.—(The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3776-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Art, East Asian—Collectors and collecting—France—Paris—History—19th century. 2. Art museums— France—Paris—History—19th century. 3. International travel—Social aspects—East Asia—History—19th century. 4. International travel--Social aspects—Europe—History—19th century. 5. Paris (France)— Civilization—19th century. 6. Europe—Relations—East Asia. 7. East Asia—Relations—Europe. I. Title. N7337.C47 2013 709.5’07444361—dc23 2012049668 ISBN 9781409437765

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction 1 1

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

13

2

Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Cernuschi’s Collection and Reappraisals of Europe and Asia

39

3

The Labor of Travel: Guimet and Régamey in Asia

73

4

Equivalence and Inversion: France, Japan, and China in Goncourt’s Cabinet

111

Conclusion 161 Bibliography 167 Index 191

v

For my family: Ying Shia Chang, Fu Hua Chang, Uncle Sam and Aunt Catherine Tang, Uncle Thomas Tang, Ann Taylor Chang, Michael, Chloé, and Will Taylor, and Allan McLeod

List of Illustrations

2.1  Portrait of Enrico (Henri) Cernuschi. Photographie de Walery. Musée Cernuschi, Paris. © Musée Cernuschi/Roger-Viollet.

3.2  Replica made in 1876 of the mandala from Temple of Toji in Kyoto. Panthéon of the Musée Guimet, Paris. Author’s photograph.

2.2  Musée Cernuschi foyer, Paris. Author’s photograph.

3.3  Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (London: John Murray, 1881), Vol. 1, 85, “A Kuruma.” Author’s photograph.

2.3  Funérailles d’Henri Cernuschi (1821– 1896), photograph on albumin paper, 1896. Musée Cernuschi, Paris. © Musée Cernuschi/ Roger-Viollet.

3.4 Hugues Krafft, “Kago à Hakone” photograph, 1882–1883. Société des Amis du Vieux Reims, Musée-Hôtel Le Vergeur, France.

2.4  Bronze vessel, jian, in glass case at left. Musée Cernuschi, MC 865, Paris. Author’s photograph.

3.5  Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878), 52. Author’s photograph.

2.5  Display of Chinese bronzes, Musée Cernuschi, Paris. Author’s photograph.

3.6  Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878), 58. Author’s photograph.

2.6  Bronze vessel, kouei (also written as gui), Musée Cernuschi, MC 2303, Paris. © Musée Cernuschi/Roger-Viollet.

3.7  Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878), 16. Author’s photograph.

2.7  Bronze vessel, tsiue (also written as dui), Musée Cernuschi, MC 649, Paris. © Musée Cernuschi/Roger-Viollet.

3.8  Eugène Atget, Un Chiffonnier le matin dans Paris, avenue des Gobelins, 1899, in “Paris pittoresque, première série.” Bibliothèque nationale de France.

3.1  Émile Guimet and Félix Régamey with their interpreters during a trip to Japan in 1876. By an unknown photographer. Positive monochrome on paper. Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

3.9  Utagawa Hiroshige II, Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo, ca. 1874. Triptych, color woodblock print. 14 1/8 x 9 7/16 in. (35.8 x 23.9 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert O. Kinsey (M.83.245.11a–c).

vii

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. © 2012 Museum Association/LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, New York.

4.2  Bernard II Vanrisamburgh, commode veneered with panels of Japanese lacquer, the borders japanned, with gilt-bronze mounts and a griotte d’Italie marble slab, 1750–1760. Bequeathed by John Jones. Victoria and Albert Museum number 1094–1882, London.

3.10 Kawanabe Kyōsai, drawing, 1876, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), 192. Author’s photograph.

4.3  “Écritoire de Korin, number 422 in Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’ExtrêmeOrient (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1897), Plate 4. Author’s photograph.

3.11  Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), 277. Author’s photograph.

4.4  Fernand Lochard, Salle à manger de la Maison des Goncourt à Auteuil, July 1883, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 10.

3.12  Félix Régamey, The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko, 1876–1878. Oil on canvas. MG4796. Musée des Arts AsiatiquesGuimet, Paris. © Réunion des musées nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

4.5  Fernand Lochard, Petit salon de la maison d’Auteuil, July 1883, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 9.

3.13  Félix Régamey, The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko, 1876–1878. Oil on canvas. MG4796, detail. Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris. © Réunion des musées nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

4.6  D. Freuler, Edmond de Goncourt dans sa salle à manger à Auteuil, 1890, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 11.

3.14 Utagawa Hiroshige III, Changing Horses at Fujieda, 1831–1834, Hoeido edition. 3.15  Félix Régamy, Promenades japonaises (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878), 160. Author’s photograph.

4.7  Jules de Goncourt, La Salle à manger de la rue Saint-Georges, n.d. (ca.1855), pen and watercolor on paper. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Département des Arts Graphiques, Inv. 8353. © Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet.

3.16  Anonymous illustration in JosephAlexandre Hübner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871, trans. Mary Herbert (London: John Murray, 1878), 236. Author’s photograph.

4.8  D. Freuler Cabinet de travail, 1890, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 18.

3.17  Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863–1865. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm. Inv. RF2772. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

4.9  Jules Dornac, Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt, from “Les Contemporains chez eux”, ca.1890, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

3.18  Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), 233. Author’s photograph. 4.1  Chinese lidded vase in Imari style, underglaze blue, overglaze iron red and gold, transformed as coffee or chocolate urn, ca 1710–1730, Victoria and Albert Museum number 116&A–1879, London.

4.10  Jules Dornac, Edmond de Goncourt dans son cabinet de travail, 1890, salt paper print. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 22.

viii

list of illustrations 4.11  Edmond de Goncourt, Portrait of Jules de Goncourt, 1857. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Ef 407a rés Goncourt. © FA/ Roger-Viollet.

photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 28. 4.14  Fernand Lochard, Vue générale de la cage d’escalier, 1883, photograph on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 5.

4.12  Joseph Primoli, Cabinet de l’ExtrêmeOrient, 1891, photograph (instantané) on albumen paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB, planche 29.

4.15  Nicolas-Henri Tardieu, etching after Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, 1733. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G3821.

4.13 Fernand Lochard, Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient à Auteuil panneau du fond avec la grande vitrine des porcelaines, June 1886,

ix

Acknowledgements

For their unflagging encouragement, friendship, and critical responses over the years, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Mark Burde, Frédérique Desbuissons, Melissa Hyde, Anne Lafont, Mark Ledbury, Roger Rouse, Aron Vinegar, and Bronwen Wilson. Alphabetical order puts Bronwen Wilson at the end of the list but she belongs at the top. Hollis Clayson and Thomas Crow are my models as scholars and mentors. I thank Catherine Philips for her warm encouragement. Brian Grosskurth was crucial to my first steps in art history and the early phases of this study. Richard Wrigley was a lecteur bénévole near the end. Despite all of their kind efforts, none of them could save me from myself. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long and I can only hope that it was worth the wait. I warmly thank David Bindman, Philippe Bordes, Sarah Betzer, David Carrier, André Dombrowski, John Finlay, Douglas Fordham, Marc Gotlieb, Michael Ann Holly, Robert Jansen, Anne McKnight, Kathy Newman, David O’Brien, Todd Porterfield, Carrie Rentschler, Charles Salas, Mary Sheriff, Jonathan Sterne, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Jennifer Tucker, Martha Ward, Michael Witmore, Richard Wrigley, and Rochelle Ziskin for their generosity in many and various ways. From the start my work on Goncourt benefited from the astute commentary of Pamela Warner, who generously shared with me not only her expertise in Goncourt studies but also her photo archive. Additional heartfelt thanks go to Jean Da Silva and Frédérique Desbuissons for accommodation in Paris. And my affectionate salutations to Catherine Wermester and Claudia Salvi, art historians and friends in Paris, whose conversations have sustained me at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and beyond. All those named above have taught me what friendship and collegiality mean. I also thank Francis Drossart and James Lieber. The response to various talks I gave at the following institutions have helped me to think through a number of issues: Binghamton University, Case Western Reserve University, the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, University of Hong Kong, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, McGill University, MIT, and the University of Pittsburgh. I further thank the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, Frick Art Library, and the Carnegie Public Library of Pittsburgh for providing excellent resources during the final writing of this book. xi

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the Berkman Fund and the Falk Fund at Carnegie Mellon University. I also thank the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art for their research facilities and institutional accommodation in 2010. Harvard Art Museum supplied an image and granted permission to publish it without charge. The Victoria and Albert Museum supports scholarship by making images available for publication for free. The Société des Amis du Vieux Reims, Musée-Hôtel Le Vergeur, and especially the Fondation Custodia in Paris provided images and permissions at nominal cost. In particular, my thanks to M.L. Colas, Présidente de l’Association des Amis du Vieux Reims; Fanny Matz, Attachée de conservation, and Mariska de Jonge at the Fondation Custodia. Ashgate’s commissioning editors, Meredith Norwich and Margaret Michniewicz, and the series editor, Michael Yonan, have been enthusiastic and helpful from start to finish. I am grateful to production editor Kathy Bond Borie for designing an attractive layout for a first book. My entire experience of publishing with Ashgate has been excellent. The two anonymous readers helped me to clarify the text. Karen Bucky, Collections Access and Reference Librarian at the Clark Art Institute Library, was fantastically efficient throughout my two residencies. Sarah Mirseyedi in the Graduate Program of Williams College provided invaluable help with my typescript in the final weeks. Allan McLeod valiantly read the different incarnations of every paper, article, and chapter. I thank him for his intellectual input and for everything else.

xii

Introduction

Attention among scholars in art history and other disciplines in the humanities has moved beyond the borders of Europe and the North Atlantic to other regions of the world in recent decades.1 Interest in Asia is now proliferating with notable speed and urgency. This book examines the history of intercultural exchange between Europe and East Asia in the nineteenth century through three French collections of Asian art. My attention lies precisely in the “trans” component of the transnational and the “cross” element of the cross-cultural. I focus on transport, on the materials and experiences of moving from one place to another on foreign terrain; I look at crossing borders in both literal and metaphoric ways. Art and cultural histories typically leave out the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel and collecting abroad, privileging instead questions of style, taste, and interpretation once the objects are relocated to Europe. Implicitly understood but glossed over are the manifold power relations that enabled such collecting and representation. I want to show the process and cost of such activities. As we will see, those who ostensibly had the upper hand in the transaction did not always maintain control. Transnational exchange had its risks. This study is a densely historicized one that brings together the political, commercial, and monetary relations underlying Euro-Asian contact. It is only by attending to systemic components that we can understand the cultural history of modern France as written through art collecting and interpretation from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This is not an analysis of particular objects in terms of style, material, facture, and function. The broader issue is how European collectors used the objects to represent Asia and to represent Europe. I focus on three individuals, Enrico (Henri) Cernuschi (1821–1896), Emile Guimet (1836–1918), and Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) instead of an encyclopedia of nineteenth-century collectors or collections of Asian art in Europe. I recognize the three as unitary subjects with distinct, individual traits, but I examine them without subscribing to the explanatory power of great men, enlightened collectors, and heroic explorers. Their personal characteristics, however determining in their activities, cannot eclipse the political and economic pressures that have always shaped the global system of power and exchange. While challenging biography as an explanatory model in the history of collecting, I nonetheless maintain an attention to the individual. Indeed, I foreground the physical and affective dimensions of personal 1

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

travel, collecting, and intercultural contact. This overlooked history of experience allows us to interrogate further the complex relationship between the private and the collective. Where or how much the circles of individual agency and historical process overlap is precisely the question. My focus on travel, specifically the experiences of Cernuschi, Duret, Guimet, and Félix Régamey (1844–1907) in East Asia, is in sympathy with a new historiography of everyday life. Alltagsgeschichte is practiced by a group of revisionist historians in Germany, who turn away from vast structural analysis to focus on individual lives.2 As the historian Brad S. Gregory points out, along with French and Italian microhistorians, scholars of everyday life underscore human agency (and its limitations) within particular networks of social relationships, thus rejecting the longue durée formations once viewed to govern private experience.3 History in this conception is made by the many human transactions that both produce and transform over time the macro phenomena of institutions, class structures, and market mechanisms.4 My subjects differ from those of microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte, however, insofar as mine are well known bourgeois travelers abroad whose names grace prominent museums rather than previously unknown, modest figures.5 Each chapter explores different aspects of power relations and their reversals. Revisionist economic histories and monetary systems, including the principle of bimetallism, will shape the study of Cernuschi. In the chapter on Guimet, I take up recent concepts in cultural geography to analyze technologies of mobility and the representation of travel in nineteenth-century Japan. My examination of Goncourt contains a conversation between literary criticism, art history, and psychoanalytic theory. The strategies of reading proposed by postcolonial scholars who highlight fissures in the colonial text underlie my study. However, it is vital to emphasize that the reversals of power created by the collections of Cernuschi, Guimet, and Goncourt were limited to the symbolic realm. The European economic and military apparatus remained largely intact. Coercion and combat ruled the day. The Western institutions of museums and collections are typically iterations of authority. For a generation of revisionist critics, museology and its cognate discipline of art history are “epistemological technologies” that create docile subjects of the bourgeois nation-state and support Western domination over the non-West.6 Museums are analyzed as one of the “cultural technologies” whose disciplinary operations work through the museum’s “exhibitionary complex.”7 I offer a more nuanced view. The journey to acquire exotic objects and the collections of Asian arts had unsettling qualities. Beyond the objects themselves, those in Asia who enabled the cross-cultural encounter led to subtle inversions of power. Why Cernuschi, Guimet, and Goncourt among all the others? As noted in 1879 by the art writer Ernest Chesneau, avid collectors of Asian and especially Japanese objects were legion. He named only Frédéric Villot, former curator of painting at the Louvre; the writers Champfleury and Philippe Burty; Louis Solon, noted ceramicist at the Sèvres company; the publisher Georges Charpentier, the bronze caster Barbedienne, and the manufacturers Christofle, Bouilhet, Falize; artists Bracquemond, Carolus-Duran, Degas, Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Hirsch, Manet, Monet, and Tissot.8 2

Introduction

There was also Empress Eugénie who did not actively collect Asian objects, but arranged or curated, after a manner, the booty from the Chinese imperial palace Yuanming Yuan sent to her by General Montauban in 1861. With these and other exotic artifacts, she created the Musée chinois in the imperial residence of Fontainebleau that was not generally accessible to the public, except upon special application to the director of the château, as fully examined in Alison McQueen’s recent monograph.9 In Souvenir d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient Raymond Koechlin (1860–1931) enumerated the next generation of collectors, born in the second half of the century.10 He identified, among dozens of his contemporaries, Guy de Cholet (1868–1916), Atherton Curtis (1863–1943), Jacques Doucet (1853–1929), Gaston Migeon (1861–1930), and Ernest Rouart (1874–1942), who married Berthe Morisot’s much portrayed daughter, Julie Manet. In addition, Alphonse de Rothschild (1827–1905), Isaac de Camondo (1851–1911), and his cousin Moïse (1860–1935), and Madame Clémence d’Ennery. And on the list continues. The phenomenon of collecting Asian objects in Europe and North America has been abundantly examined in the scholarship over several decades.11 The identification of Asian, and particularly Japanese, influences, to use a familiar term, or impact on Western arts and the exhibition of such evidence in multiple forms have proven to be inexhaustible.12 What has not been emphasized are the unique ways in which each of the three in my study intervened in discursive fields whose interlocking subjects were Japan, China, and France.13 The protagonists of my study were chosen not only for their systematic efforts, but also for the valuable and unique records they created. Théodore Duret’s Voyage en Asie, published in 1874, and Guimet’s Promenades japonaises of 1878 and 1880 respectively described the journeys of Cernuschi, Guimet, and Régamey.14 They are primary sources on transnational relations. For Goncourt we have a different kind of primary document. He did not set foot in Asia to form his collection. Instead of a travel account he wrote La Maison d’un artiste, published in 1881, to narrate his house and precious objects.15 His work is vital for complicating the modalities of collecting, exhibiting, and representing Europe and Asia. The refusal of this major cultural figure to donate to an existing museum, or to create a new one, went against French ideologies of cultural patrimony that typically demanded a transfer from private to public ownership. Thus, in addition to his polymorphous creations in word, image, objects, and display he offers insight into competing ideas of the museum in his time. In La Maison d’un artiste, whose very title denotes containment rather than voyage or promenade, Goncourt presented collecting as an exercise of the eye more than the leg. He reveals a distinct use of art collecting for a singular representation of France that was dialectically bound with Japan and China. His conception of this project and his arguments differed in significant ways from those of his contemporaries Guimet and Cernuschi. Goncourt used the arts of Japan and China to grieve for an imagined France, but as I will show, that surrogacy came at a price. The equivalence he suggested between these different artistic traditions diminished the eighteenth-century French art he celebrated. It is significant that the three knew each other. Goncourt wrote about his meetings with Cernuschi in his diary; Guimet repeatedly invited Goncourt to his museum in Paris.16 Letters to Goncourt survive from the artist Régamey, Guimet’s travel 3

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

companion to East Asia in 1876.17 The trio of collectors responded to each other’s efforts with divergent conceptions and methods. They all worked at the same historical turning point after the fall of the Second French Empire, the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Paris Commune that marked the beginning of the Third Republic. In the case of Cernuschi, I connect his theory of the harmonized use of gold and silver standards for the first time with his collection of Asian bronze artifacts. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 2, the precious metals of gold and silver had ideological functions associated with the degree of civilization, correlated in turn with economic might. West was gold and East was silver in both monetary and metaphoric terms. As an authority on currency standards, Cernuschi advocated a legislated ratio of silver to gold at 15.5 to 1. The stability he predicted in exchange rates would extend to other realms, or so the theory went, maintaining the balance of power among nations. But his collection of early bronze artifacts from Asia introduced an anomalous factor to the equation. In the world of cultural rather than economic attainment this third material complicated the evaluation of Western gold supremacy and non-Western silver inferiority. Examined from this untried view, his work as a theorist and art collector sheds new light on the fluctuations of value in transnational exchange. Guimet shows another aspect of the problem. When the wealthy industrialist from Lyons set off in 1876 to survey Eastern religions and collect their many implements, he had a fleet of local aides. As a visitor he both employed and was subjected to an alien physicality. In a different and equally unexpected manner Guimet experienced an inversion of power on his journey in his relations with those who facilitated his trip. Guimet and his collaborator Régamey felt it at the somatic level through movement across space, an experience that would reconfigure the classic imagery of the Western, active, male traveler and the passive, feminized East. Guimet and Régamey made visible in representation how the politics of travel intersected with and destabilized the normative polarities of gender and race. A comparison between Régamey’s representations and those of his Japanese counterparts shows the extent to which artists engaged with the technologies of mobility on both sides of the East–West divide. My approach adds the individual dimension to the study of museums and collections in all their heterogeneity. It is only by attending to personal as well as public negotiations that we can grasp what Asian art was imagined to do for its European publics in the late nineteenth century. Duret, like other visitors to East Asia, voiced the common view of Japan as the most decorative and aesthetic of nations. Japan’s rank above China and India in the nineteenth century, and each of the three positions in the Western hierarchy will need a separate account. But instead of attending only to European perceptions, I look at Japan’s self-presentation through collectable objects, cultural monuments, producers, and merchants in a network of mediations. Thus I interpret Duret’s Voyage en Asie, Guimet’s Promenades japonaises, and Cernuschi’s collection against their own claims in order to highlight Japan’s strategy of transformation at a crucial moment of its own modern history. The instability of the discourse that produced an ahistorical “Orient,” here denoting the Far East or the “Extrême Orient,” is limited in my study to Japan and China, whose artistic and material creations formed the largest part of the collections under review.18 4

Introduction

India will be left out for its marginal role in the holdings of Duret, Guimet, and Goncourt. Apart from their personal choices, at a larger level there was diminished collective investment in India after the Seven Year’s War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763. British victory in the war led to the surrender of French trading stations in India. Henceforth Britain’s growing dominance in the region meant that France had little chance of making much inroad. Although it created a successful port town in Pondicherry in 1764, France would continually lose and regain its position in India in the following centuries. In the nineteenth century, France turned to Japan and China as greater territories of incursion. But here the relationship between the personal activities of Cernuschi, Guimet, and Goncourt and collective interests is oblique; to think otherwise is to miss its complex overdeterminations. A Concise Review of Studies of Western Collections and Museums Studies of Western collections and museums have taken three broad lines of inquiry in recent decades: an institutional critique of the museum as a tool of power/ knowledge; an anthropological and sociological analysis of collecting as a universal social practice; histories of individual collectors, and private and public collections. Two important lacunae in the literature should be noted at the outset for their conceptual and methodological implications: the distinction between a museum and a collection remains unexamined beyond the straightforward matter of access. Those who engage in institutional critique refer to an undifferentiated monolith, “the Museum,” stripped of the individual traits of disparate types of museums. As the curator and art historian Ivan Gaskell has argued, to overlook the differences in scale, culture, ostensible purpose, and organization that exist between museums runs the risk of essentialism and caricature.19 Beyond the problem noted by Gaskell is the equally significant issue of divergent treatments: personal collections are not subjected to the same analysis of ideology, or the impact of class, race, and gender, as in the critical study of museums. Although the participation of private collectors in manifold structures of domination might be tacitly recognized, there is, on the whole, an affirmative and occasionally celebratory approach to the work of chosen individuals.20 Institutional critique involves the opposite: collections and museums are variously examined as both the agents and the products of imperial, colonial, and patriarchal regimes. The ideological critique from the 1990s onward drew on Bourdieu and Darbel, Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, and others who examined issues of space and spectatorship, discipline, and social reproduction. The art historians Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach portrayed the Western art museum as a vehicle of an ideologically motivated instruction.21 Their study of the “universal survey museum” demonstrated how architecture, the disposition of art objects and even decoration—a combination later referred by others as the strategies or the politics of display—work together to create national narratives.22 The still fairly benign sense of the global survey for Duncan and Wallach would be replaced by more repressive terms of surveillance and regulation in later scholarship.23 The disregard for women as creators and viewers in museums 5

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

has been further highlighted by feminist scholars.24 A representative work is Griselda Pollock’s criticism of the joint operations of art history and museology in enforcing, in her pithy formulation, a “structural phallocentrism and narcissistic sexism.”25 Further in this vein is Donald Preziosi’s strident meta-critique of the two associated disciplines. He pushed the work of those above to their extreme with polemical verve, but notably without any attention to the concrete matters of space, architecture, or display. Only one establishment, the Soane Museum in London, is actually named and discussed in his collected writings. Thus in Preziosi’s analysis, the institution in general terms is a tool in teleological fictions of history and the production of compliant subjects and objects of the modern nation-state. Extending beyond national borders, art history and museology as invented in the Western hemisphere were instruments in the colonization of the cultures of the world.26 Tony Bennett writes along the same lines with regard to actual institutions in Britain, Australia, and the United States. The sociologist made clear his debt to Foucault in The Birth of the Museum in which he argued that “the exhibitionary complex” sets up a permanent display of power/knowledge.27 He subsequently examined museums in early colonial Australia, where they functioned in programs to assimilate Aboriginal peoples.28 While the revisionists try to bring down the museum’s very foundations, curators— one might say museophiles by profession—tend to their building through acquisition, conservation, and display. The incompatibility of the academic and curatorial perspectives has generated it own discourse.29 Gaskell stated that as museums are indeed the principal medium through which viewers have access to art objects, and as academic critics have pointed out, they are “evidently in positions of power and can reflect and impose hegemonic norms.”30 But he countered that institutional critique itself rests on assumptions and ideologies. In effect, he demonstrated the impasse between critics and apologists when he invoked the default position of curators: academics may theorize, but museum professionals have concrete knowledge based on objects “in all their untidy and bewildering complexity.”31 In a parallel manner, the biographical study of collectors defends their status through the quality of their objects and donations and their life stories. One among scores of examples is the monograph on the Havemeyers by Frances Weitzenhoffer.32 The book opens with the adolescent Louisine Elder, a New Yorker in Paris, who befriended Mary Cassatt. It recounts the formation of an extraordinary collection by Louisine and her husband Henry Havemeyer, and ends with her death and posthumous benefaction to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The good taste of the Havemeyers eclipses the broader history of American plutocrats as art collectors and the initial undervaluation of Impressionist painting in France. A much needed new direction is provided by the authors of a recent volume on Isabella Stewart Gardner. Her journey through East Asia with her husband Jack Gardner in 1883 to 1884 and their subsequent collection are fully situated in overlapping histories of Western knowledge of Asia, the growing availability of collectable objects, and the social practices of the American elite.33 From a broadly anthropological and sociological outlook, the historian Krzysztof Pomian defined a collection in general as “a group of objects temporarily or permanently kept out of the circuit of economic activity, put under special protection in spaces 6

Introduction

specially arranged for such use and exposed to view.”34 His claim of collecting as a universal institution in which all collected objects play the role of intermediary between the visible world of the viewer and the invisible world described in myths and histories shows a largely apolitical view.35 Unlike institutional critique, Pomian’s outlook gives greater emphasis to the kinds of objects collected than the socio-political profiles of those who create museums. Moreover, every museum is self evidently a collection, yet also different: museums, given certain lasting juridical and financial guarantees not always available to individual collectors, can protect their contents beyond a single lifetime.36 The determining fact of public access affects a museum’s content and display, hence the institution’s most basic responsibility to show objects to a public in the best conditions separates it from all other sites of collections such as the church, palace, or private gallery.37 Pomian thus provides, almost involuntarily, the most developed distinction between public museums and private collections. Others who can be put in the category of sociological approaches include those in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. This prolific group considers the museum’s role in the formation of individual and national identities, but with less focus on its moralizing or disciplinary role. In this respect the title of one edited volume, Museums and the Making of Ourselves: The Role of Objects in National Identity, is indicative.38 From this perspective the modern institution is often seen in positive terms as a function of democratization and growing educational need. Issues of unequal access among constituent groups are acknowledged. Museums, their contents and display are examined as both the products and agents of social change. Among art historians, Francis Haskell pioneered the historiography of collections and patronage, and the related questions of taste. Committed to what he called a “severely empirical” method, the author abstained on principle from any overarching theory of collecting and patronage. He traced a general pattern of artistic careers in seventeenth-century Rome as shaped by powerful collectors in his Patrons and Painters, but stressed that “no single definition can cover the position of the artist in society.”39 Haskell also rejected the idea of an “explanation” of art in relation to patronage, or any meta-narrative of collecting.40 His empirical approach and refusal to venture broad generalizations should not be confused with a lack of criticality. Indeed, Haskell’s focus on reception, related to “taste,” in his terminology, on the historically variable reputations of artists, and the instability of the European canon over time, as Craig Clunas has commented, address some of the major issues of a social history of art.41 What is nonetheless lacking are political coordinates: Haskell did not refer to structural antagonisms between social groups, for instance, even when he examined the authority of patrons over painters. Herein his crucial difference with later, revisionist histories of art making, collecting, and museums. On the other side of the English Channel, Haskell’s contemporary Antoine Schnapper pursued the exhaustive and empirical surveys of collectors and collections in seventeenth-century France.42 Schnapper refused all “interprétation globalisante” on the grounds that a great variety of actions were taken by the many artists, dealers, and patrons in the world of collecting and collections, hence too disparate to be reduced to one overarching narrative.43 In effect, method follows material in Schnapper’s work: 7

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

the available evidence determines the questions posed and answered. Post-mortem inventories, marriage contracts, wills, letters, or register of sales and revenues, and the like constitute the historical record. The vagaries of their retrieval thus limit the nature and object of inquiry. Indeed, the author of Curieux du grand siècle: Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle insisted on the narrow scope of what can be known even with the most rigorous research in the most abundant archives. Thus he warned his readers at the outset that they would not know why one collected in seventeenth-century France, but they will learn more about how individuals collected.44 Stephen Bann, at odds with Schnapper’s conceptual framework, but linked to Pomian, Haskell, and Schnapper in his rigorous attention to historical context, examined what he termed the poetics of the museum. The idea is based on the assumed possibility of reconstructing and relating the procedures and principles that formed a museum to the epistemological presumption of the time.45 Using tropological terms of metonym and synecdoche, Bann argued that Alexandre Lenoir’s Napoleonic Musée des monuments français, made of fragments believed to represent adequately the whole country or past centuries in a “reductive and mechanistic part-whole relation,” works metonymically. Synecdoche operates in an institution such as the Musée Cluny. The objects collected by its founder, Alexandre du Sommerard, are displayed to give the impression of access to late medieval and early modern times, and the real individuals with whom they were identified in an “integrative construction of historical totalities.”46 As a historian, Bann examined the July Monarchy in which the Musée des monuments français and the Musée Cluny were established; the emergence of the museum, in other words, was situated in French revolutionary politics. Further, he discerned in the contents of a collection and in the varied modes of display the epistemological totalities and ruptures of an age.47 Bann’s historical orientation prevails over his theoretical commitments when he averred that museums and the earlier cabinets of curiosities were created by individuals with wide-ranging cultural concerns operating in real historical circumstances.48 He achieved his stated goal of “a more inclusive historical procedure” that acknowledges “the network of symbols, the dynamic interchange of signifying practices in which a collection was strategically situated.”49 Here Bann is comparable to Pomian in his interest in the cultural and historical conditions, including contemporary epistemic orders, in which specific collections were formed.50 Institutional critique has irrefutably brought deeper understanding of the manifold functions of museums. Yet the valuable insights have reached their limits. Unexamined museums can always be located, but the basic story of dominant authorities using the display of objects as an instrument of power is now well known. Moreover, as Andrew McClellan argues, the museum itself is fading in relevance. The ruling class now has more effective tools of indoctrination than museums: the media, sports events, public education, and organized religion reach their audiences with greater efficacy.51 David Carrier makes a similar argument in Museum Skepticism.52 He too has misgivings about the museum’s place in relation to more accessible contemporary diversions. Carrier’s approach is somewhere between institutional critique and a historical study of particular museums. Like McClellan, he reviews the institution’s birth and decline in both its premise and uncertain relevance in the contemporary world. 8

Introduction

On the opposite track (and without skepticism,) empiricists turn to singular collectors and collections. The problem remains of not conceptualizing the relationship between individuals, communities, and historical contexts, which leads to the tacit assumption of both coherence and individual exceptionalism. And in a related way the monographic, chiefly biographic, study of collectors is still defined by individual taste and activity, thereby neglecting the socio-political and economic forces behind their activity. Thus the principal modes of inquiry into museums, collections, and their founders have come to a stalemate. In the following chapters I offer some unexplored approaches. Notes 1 Two recent examples that prominently include the work of art historians are Michael North, ed., Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops, and Collections (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Mary Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 2 Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). I thank the historian Jean-Paul Zuniga for this reference. 3 Brad S. Gregory, “Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life,” review of The History of Everyday Life, Lüdtke, ed., History and Theory 38, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 100–110. See also John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 ( Jan. 2010): 87–109. 4 Gregory, “Is Small Beautiful?” 105. 5 See the landmark studies of Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmology of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 6 Donald Preziosi’s concise statement is in “Museology and Museography,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 1 (March 1995): 13–15. 7 The terms belong to Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), whose work is explicitly indebted to the Foucauldian model of analysis. An earlier pioneering study is Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual,” Marxist Perspectives (Winter 1978): 28–51, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur publics (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969). 8 Ernest Chesneau, “Le Japon à Paris,” in L’Art moderne à l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: Publication de la Gazette des beaux-arts, 1879), 463. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise stated. 9 Alison McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 227–35. 10 Raymond Koechlin, Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient (Chalon-sur-Saône: Imprimerie française et Orientale, 1930), 2–16. See the commentary and translation by Max Put, Plunder and Pleasure: Japanese Art in the West 1860–1930 (Leiden: Hotei Publications, 2000). 11 Only a small sampling would include Jean-Paul Bouillon, “À gauche: note sur la Société du Jing-Lar et sa signification,” Gazette des beaux-arts 91, no. 1310 (March 1978): 107–18. Henry Adams, “John La Farge’s Discovery of Japanese Art: A New Perspective on the Origins of Japonisme,” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 3 (September 1985): 449–85. Gabriel Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (New York: Abrams; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1986). Gabriel Weisberg and Yvonne Weisberg, eds., Japonisme. An Annotated Bibliography (New York and London: Garland, 1990).

9

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 12 The bibliography continues to grow. Again, merely a small selection would include N.G. Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception, trans. Walter Nash (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1954); Gabriel Weisberg, Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910 (Cleveland: Kent State University Press, 1975); Geneviève Lacambre and Gabriel Weisberg, Le Japonisme (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988); Yamada Chisaburō and Ōmori Tatsuji, eds., Japonisme in Art: An International Symposium (Tokyo: Committee for the Year 2001, 1980); and most recently, the exhibition “The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art: 1854–1918” at the Mississippi Museum of Art and the McNay Museum of Art in Texas. See Gabriel P. Weisberg, ed., The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art: 1854–1918 (Seattle and London: Mississippi Museum of Art in association with the University of Washington Press, 2011). Also in 2011, a smaller exhibition of major European jewelers who drew direct influence from Japanese forms was “Japonisme: From Falize to Fabergé, The Goldsmith and Japan” at the London antique vendor Wartski, May 10–20, 2011, featuring the work of Vever, Lalique, Boucheron, Georges Fouquet. Yet another recent addition is Manuela Moscatiello, Le Japonisme de Giuseppe de Nittis: un peintre italien en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2011). This list is by no means exhaustive. 13 An important exception is the rich scholarship on Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s collection, which will be examined in Chapter 4. 14 Théodore Duret, Voyage en Asie (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1874). Émile Guimet and Félix Régamey, Promenades japonaises (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878) and Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880). 15 Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, 2 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1881). 16 Guimet’s letter to Goncourt, dated March 2, 1895, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BN MSS naf 22465 (microforme 14574), No. 57, Paris. Guimet’s Conservateur adjoint, E. Deshays, repeated the invitation to Goncourt on March 16, 1891. BnF, MSS, n.a.fr 22460 (microfilm 14569), No. 294. 17 Régamey’s letter to Goncourt in 1892 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, N.A.Fr. 22474 (MF 14585), No. 84, 89–91. 18 As the subject is China and Japan in the nineteenth century, the complex issue of when they became unified modern nation states in history will be simply acknowledged but not examined at length. 19 Ivan Gaskell, review of On the Museum’s Ruins, by Douglas Crimp; The Cultures of Collecting, by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal; Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, by Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, The Art Bulletin 77, no. 4 (December 1995): 673–5. 20 See the special issue “The Art Collector: Between Philanthropy and Self-Glorification,” The Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 2 (November 2009). 21 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art. Duncan and Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual,” 28–51, reprinted in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004): 483–500; Duncan and Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4, (December 1980): 449–69. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995). 22 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. 23 See the following anthologies: Preziosi and Farago, Grasping the World. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge; and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Marcia Pointon, ed., Art Apart. Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994). 24 Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” Art Journal 48, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 171–8. On the National Museum in the Arts see Anne Higonnet, “A New Center: The Nation Museum of Women in the Arts,” in Sherman and Rogoff, Museum Culture, 250–64.

10

Introduction 25 Griselda Pollock, “A History of Absence Belatedly Addressed: Impressionism with and without Mary Cassatt,” in The Two Art Histories, ed. Charles Haxthausen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 123–41. Also Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas.” 26 Donald Preziosi, “Collecting/Museum,” in Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 and 2003), 408. Also Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body. Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). The same work is found in “Museology and Museography,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 1 (March 1995): 13–15, and Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), especially 54–79. Six texts were republished as Preziosi, In the Aftermath of Art. Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 27 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. 28 Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 155–7. We can put in the same category Nancy Einreinhofer, The American Art Museum: Elitism and Democracy (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997). 29 In addition to the conference held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 1999, Haxthausen notes two sessions held at the College Art Association annual meetings in 2001 on the issue of divergent approaches to art history in the museum and the university: “Braving (and Bridging) the Great Divide: The Academy and the Museum,” and “Art History: In the Museum and the University.” See also Maurice Davies, The Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 97–100. 30 Gaskell, review, 674. 31 Ibid., 675. 32 Frances Weitzenhofter, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986). 33 Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, eds., Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (Pittsburgh: Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, 2009). 34 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe – XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 37. 35 Ibid., 37. 36 Krzysztof Pomian, “Musée et patrimoine,” in Patrimoines en folie, ed. Henri Pierre Jeudy (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1990), 177–98. 37 Ibid., 185–6. 38 A selection includes Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections:, A Cultural Study (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992). Pearce, ed., Museums and the Appropriation of Culture (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1994). Flora Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of Ourselves. The Role of Objects in National Identity (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996). Simon Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, Sheila Watson, eds., Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed (London: Routledge, 2007). Sheila Watson, ed., Museums and Their Communities (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), 6–23. 40 Haskell, Patrons and Painters, xviii. See also Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art. Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981).

11

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 41 Craig Clunas, “Social History of Art,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 465–77, especially 468. I thank Allan McLeod for this reference. 42 Antoine Schnapper, Curieux du grand siècle: Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), and Le Géant, la licorne et la tulipe. Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988). See also Haskell, “Only Collect,” review of Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux and Schnapper, Curieux du grand siècle, The New York Review of Books ( January 30, 1992): 27–9. 43 Schnapper, Curieux du grand siècle, 18. 44 Ibid. 45 Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 78. 46 Ibid., 85–7. 47 Stephen Bann, Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), writes on page 8, “… each historically sited practice [of collecting] was itself grounded in a specific epistemological field …”, and throughout the book. 48 Ibid., 9. 49 Ibid., in the context of a discussion of the dangers of assuming a genealogy of the cabinet of curiosities and museums. 50 Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. 51 Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008). 52 David Carrier, Museum Skepticism. A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

12

1 The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

Before turning to the main figures of this book, I outline a brief history of French relations with China and Japan in the nineteenth century. For the purposes of this study I will limit my attention to Britain and France, with due emphasis on the latter. In the second half of the chapter, I highlight a number of travel accounts written not by the large cast of Western visitors to Asia, but by the much less familiar voices of Japanese and Chinese representatives to the West. The contest for domination in Asia was in large part motivated by intra-European competition. Louis XIV wanted the Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales that he launched in 1664 to establish footholds for a French presence in the Indian Ocean. The venture would allegedly cure all ills, from failing domestic industries, unemployment, to social turmoil, according to the official propagandist, François Charpentier (1620–1702), of the Académie française.1 France would gain and lose its footholds when it had to relinquish much of its colonial territory to Britain after the Seven Year’s War in 1673 and again after the defeat of Napoleon. The humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 led to a new phase of openly imperialist aggression, or what the historian Raoul Girardet terms the emergence of “la conscience coloniale” in the Third Republic.2 Historians agree that earlier regimes between 1815 and 1870 had made gains in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in order to meet political needs at home. The government of Charles X conquered Algeria in 1830 to affirm the prestige of the newly restored Bourbons. During the July Monarchy, Louis Philippe took over strategic islands from Mayotte in the Indian Ocean to Tahiti and New Caledonia in the Pacific from the 1840s onward. Napoleon III pursued territories in Indochina, Mexico (unsuccessfully), and Syria from the 1850s to the 1860s to connect the Second Empire to the heyday of the ancien regime empire. But a coherent desire for aggressive colonial development would emerge only in the second decade of the Third Republic (1870 to 1940). The country’s incursions in Asia and Africa were to make up for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany.3 Admiral Dupré, the French governor of Indochina, wrote in explicit terms that such national humiliation precisely demanded new efforts at supranational hegemony.4 Anxieties about the future of France, the 13

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

historian Girardet notes, led to an ideology of imperialism for which support existed among every political group in the early Third Republic, whether Orleanists, royalists, legitimists, and Republicans. Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, staunch Republicans who each had a brief term as prime minister in the early 1880s, argued that great nations endure only when they extend their reach beyond their borders. The rhetoric going as far back as Louis XIV was thus revived: France could not be left behind as other European powers spread out from Africa to Asia. By the 1880s, French Indochina included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Tunisia was made a French protectorate in 1881, and Morocco in 1912. The French Republic expanded its territories in Africa, moving from coastal trading posts to conquer much of western and equatorial Africa, from Mauritania to the Congo, and finally colonizing the large island of Madagascar first eyed by the Sun King. From the perspective of knowledge production, members of the Société de Géographie, founded in Paris in 1821, became active proponents of overseas expansion. Their influence spread through a network of learned societies that eventually formed a powerful, respected lobby. Trade and science were allied in 1876, when the chamber of commerce helped to create the Société de géographie commerciale. Henceforth geographers and explorers argued that economic and political interests were no less at stake than scientific advances. Guimet and Cernuschi, neither museum professionals nor authorities in the knowledge industry, contributed to the shared effort of learning when they built public institutions with private means. For didactic ends they featured the religious objects of Asia in desacralized form. Guimet’s membership in the Société Asiatique and his effort to create a center of Asian studies around his collection advanced the study of China and Japan in Europe. After his death, a series of administrative and curatorial decisions would expand the Musée Guimet into “the national museum of Asian art” in France in the twentieth century. Britain first established its presence in the region through the East India Company in the seventeenth century. Although not allowed in Japan, it was dominant among Europeans in India. In China the Company had a monopoly to trade at Canton under strict conditions. The British demand for tea pushed its growing import from 65,000 pounds in 1701 to nearly five million pounds in 1780.5 Tea, porcelain, and silk together created an imbalance in China’s favor of some ten million pounds sterling between 1792 and 1807.6 In 1792, George III dispatched Lord Macartney to negotiate a treaty with the Chinese. The goal was to establish a permanent British embassy in Beijing, open treaty ports, and create improved conditions for commerce. The failed Macartney embassy was followed by a second and no more successful effort in 1816 by Lord Amherst. The British trade deficit would be corrected through opium from India whose efficacy was such that the China not only exhausted its trade surplus within twenty years, but also began to deplete its silver reserves from 1830 onward.7 In preceding decades the approach was one of calm entreaty, as Lord Macartney had recommended in his time: “Our present interests, our reason, and our humanity equally forbid the thoughts of any offensive measures with regard to the Chinese, whilst a ray of hope remains for succeeding by gentle ones.”8 The opposite prevailed in the nineteenth century. In 1839, Britain responded to Chinese resistance with 16 warships, 4 armed 14

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

steamers, 27 transport ships, and ultimately 10,000 troops for three years of coastal warfare. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 that ended the First Opium War gave the victor more than the conditions earlier sought by Macartney. Among the key terms were a massive cash settlement, the cession of Hong Kong, and the opening of five coastal cities to British trade. In a supplementary treaty, China agreed to unfavorably fixed tariffs rates and extraterritoriality, and also extended these conditions to France (the Treaty of Huangpu, 1844), and the United States without the surrender of territory. In brief, the Qing regime gave up its control in trade and foreign relations. Defeat in the Second Opium War of 1858 to 1860 against Britain and France led to the still more punitive Treaty of Tianjin that imposed additional indemnities, permanent foreign legations in Beijing, the opening of ten more ports, international concessions under complete Western control in major Chinese cities, and the legalization of the opium trade.9 The United States, Germany, Holland, and Spain shortly obtained similar conditions. Britain would monopolize fully 80 percent of China’s foreign trade in the 1860s and 60 percent as late as 1899.10 Thus deterritorialized, to use the historian James Hevia’s terms, China was reterritorialized by Western, and especially British, power. China was to be the pupil of more advanced nations, whose equality the Celestial Empire had no choice but to recognize. The teacher-student relationship was manifest, for one, in the British training of Chinese troops in techniques of European warfare to quell the revolts that plagued China in the long nineteenth century. Among the latter, the most important were the Taiping Rebellion of 1856–1864 which erupted in opposition to foreign aggression, and the Boxer Uprising of 1900. These events further cost the Qing regime disproportionate compensation and legal concessions to affected foreign powers including Japan. The series of treaties in 1844, 1858, and 1861 following the two Opium Wars awarded the status of most favored nation to Britain and France. The latter gained equal access to treaty ports in China, where French merchants conducted trade on the same terms as British. These privileges formed the legal basis for French activity in China until the end of the Third Republic. From the 1880s onward, France pursued its industrial hegemony in northern China: the concession for the Beijing-Hankou Railway and a railway from Hanoi to Kunming in Yunnan province became focal points of interest.11 The pursuit of railway concessions, as the historian Frances Wood has noted, reflected the division of China into spheres of interest well beyond the treaty ports. France wanted the strategic areas bordering Indochina; Germany claimed Shantung province in the north; Britain was everywhere.12 China was subject to a relationship of semi-colonialism or informal imperialism.13 Jürgen Osterhammel describes an “informal empire” as a largely stable and permanent situation “in which overt foreign rule is avoided while economic advantages are secured by ‘unequal’ legal and institutional arrangements, and also by the constant threat of political meddling and military coercion.”14 Other historians subsequently opened up the informal empire to an epistemological engagement with the subject state.15 In the economic realm, the triangular trade between India, China, and Britain rewarded the world’s largest imperium.16 The drug trade created a perfect circle: Indian-grown opium brought silver from China to Britain to finance, in turn, the 15

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

latter’s overseas empire, including ongoing expansion in India. Once legalized in China, the British sale of opium increased tenfold within a decade; at its peak in 1879, some 5,000 tons entered the country.17 Japan successfully avoided such harm in the nineteenth century. The American Commodore Matthew Perry’s well known forays in July 1853, commanding four “Black Ships” and 19 vessels in February 1854, produced the Treaty of Amity with the Tokugawa regime that opened five trading ports in addition to Nagasaki.18 Other north Atlantic powers shortly followed in their demands. Japan escaped the brutal treatment meted out to China in part by pre-emptively signing asymmetrical agreements with the United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Indeed, Townsend Harris, the first U.S. Consul, exploited local anxieties when he implied that Japan could only stop the British introduction of opium by accepting the conditions of the American government. News of the Treaty of Tianjin allowed Harris to wrest from Japan a second agreement.19 Although much less punitive than the versions imposed on China, the “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” of 1858 gave further privileges to the U.S. Within a year, Britain, Holland, Russia, and France extracted the same conditions, opening more Japanese ports to trade and putting the country still under shogunate rule in a semi-colonial state.20 Like China, Japan lost its right to determine trade tariffs and accepted the extraterritorial rule of foreigners on its soil. The intra-European and especially the Franco-British rivalry in large part determined policies in Japan. When the latter objected to foreign troops stationed in Yokohama, France and Britain each insisted on its military presence to keep up with the other.21 Japan did not altogether avoid warfare. In 1864, an allied British, French, Dutch, and American squadron attacked the naval batteries in the Shimonoseki Straits in retaliation against native violence to Western nationals.22 The conflicts paradoxically led to closer ties between the Tokugawa regime and France. Japan negotiated a special relationship with Paris, exchanging trade concessions for military instruction, weapons, and technologies.23 France pursued a combined policy of aggression and assistance.24 Captain Charles Chanoine arrived in 1867 to provide the Japanese with military instruction; more officers of the French army joined in the exercise in 1872. The French minister in Japan, Léon Roches, offered the services of the naval engineer François-Léonce Verny, then building gunboats for China, to construct a new dockyard and modern arsenal at Yokosuka.25 The project lasted from 1865 to 1882. Louis-Emile Bertin, another naval engineer, helped to build the Imperial Japanese Navy.26 Still other forms of French tutelage included legal education to Japanese students in France by Gustave-Emile Boissonade de Fontarabie, jurist and vice-rector of the University of Paris. The latter was invited to Japan in 1873 as an advisor to the Ministry of Justice.27 Such relations continued at various levels until 1880.28 Japan’s priority was to renegotiate the treaties signed in 1858 to 1859 by the deposed Tokugawa regime.29 Duret and Cernuschi (and a few years later, Guimet and Régamey) arrived at this pivotal moment. The voyage of the first pair coincided with the Iwakura Mission to the United States and Europe from 1871 to 1873, about which more below. Prince Iwakura Tomomi, Foreign Minister and the second highest ranking officer in 16

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

the Meiji government, had a not inconsiderable mandate. His legation was to raise the profile of the recently established Meiji regime among Western powers, to investigate and report on the latter’s various institutions, and to broach the subject of amending the treaties signed in 1858 and 1859. Disappointment in the last domain led to accelerated efforts at Japan’s self-development: a telegraph line, a railway, and a national bank opened in 1873 in quick succession. At Tomioka, the first mechanized factory for silk filature, opened with French help, would outstrip China as the leading exporter of raw silk by the early twentieth century.30 Like the North Atlantic powers, Japan in turn pursued imperial ambitions in Asia. An early step was the 1871 “Sino-Japanese Treaty of Amity” that acknowledged the titular equality of Japan to China. In 1876 (the year of Guimet’s voyage), Japan sent warships to Busan (Pusan) Harbor to wrest from Korea unilateral privileges of the kind normally reserved for Western powers.31 Japan later won the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 over control of Korea, long a Chinese tribute state. The ensuing Treaty of Shimonoseki gave the victor a settlement of over 2 million taels of silver (approximately 150 million U.S. dollars) and the status of most favored nation, and opened territories to Japanese trade and settlement.32 Japan had manifestly unseated China in regional dominance. It also ended its subordination to Britain in the same period via the “Treaty of Commerce and Navigation” of 1894 that would terminate British extraterritoriality within five years. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan reached political equality with the world’s leading nations and provided real competition in certain areas of trade.33 And by 1911 it had effectively regained full tariff autonomy from Euro-American powers.34 Cernuschi, Duret, Guimet, and Régamey traversed East Asia in this moment of shifting relations. They had limited knowledge of the histories and cultures they encountered and no language skills. The choice of destination for Cernuschi and Duret was likely influenced by contemporary interest in Japanese creations, all the more so as Duret the businessman, novice art critic, and collector counted among his friends Manet, Degas, and Pissarro.35 As authors of travel accounts, Duret, Cernuschi, Guimet and Régamey were preceded by a long line of European visitors who recorded their firsthand experiences of East Asia. Foreign travel was not allowed in Japan in the seventeenth century, thus only employment in European embassies or in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) offered foreign access. Some of the most important accounts hence issued from the company’s educated delegates. Their writings belonged to the category of secular knowledge-making, religions surveyed in these works only as part of the comprehensive study of various aspects of Japanese history and society. The German physician Engelbert Kæmpfer, born in 1651 in Westphalia, worked for the VOC from 1690 to 1692, during which time he accumulated a variety of artefacts for his encyclopaedic project.36 His collection of seventeenth-century Chinese prints and Japanese woodcuts by Ihara Saikaku was formed 50 years before both Western and native interest in ukiyo-e prints.37 The British naturalist Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, sponsored an English translation of Kæmpfer’s unpublished manuscript, The History of Japan, published in 1727, which would make an immense impact on European 17

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

intellectual circles.38 Sloane also purchased much of the physician’s collection of religious icons, maps, and texts, which formed the core of the British Museum in 1753.39 Kæmpfer’s work was superseded by Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828). A pupil of Linnaeus at the University of Upsala, Thunberg also entered Japan as a VOC physician. His Flora Japonica of 1784 described 812 plant species of which over 300 were unknown.40 (His achievement would secure him the professorship vacated by Linnaeus.41) He later produced a travel diary that, like Kæmpfer’s account, was translated into German, French, and English.42 Thunberg’s botanical treatise and his Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa became chief sources of European knowledge on the distant continents.43 The American officer J.W. Spalding made the link between travel narratives, knowledge production, and imperial ambition explicit when he read both Kæmpfer and Thunberg while sailing with Commodore Perry to Tokyo in 1853.44 Perry would consult another authority on Japan, Philip Franz von Siebold, a German physician who spent six years in the Dutch embassy at Nagasaki in the 1820s. With both Kæmpfer’s Amoenitatum exoticarum and Thunberg’s Flora Japonica in hand, Siebold sought to outdo his predecessors.45 A fascinating story, his acquisition of forbidden articles such as maps of Japan led to an expulsion in 1829. In Leiden, he published Florae japonicae, Fauna japonica, and Nippon Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan, the last title becoming the single most influential work on the subject, reprinted in numerous editions and translated into several European languages for centuries to come.46 Nippon Archiv and Siebold’s other publications on Japanese society, natural history, and wildlife effectively surpassed all previous Western studies in detail. Further, he collected paintings and prints by Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige, in the case of the last two, before their national success and international renown. Siebold turned his collection of some five thousand articles into a museum in Leiden. Within a year, the Dutch government bought the collection and after a number of versions—Japansch Museum, Rijks Japansch Museum von Siebold—it formed a part of the expanded and renamed Rijks Ethnographisch Museum in 1864.47 Siebold’s many paintings, decorative arts, books, weapons, and utensils of daily life would attract visitors from all over the continent, including the Frenchmen Albert Jacquemart and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.48 Further materials were available in Histoire et description générale du Japon, produced in 1738 by the Jesuit Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, which saw six reprints and a paperback edition in 1844.49 Charlevoix also produced a history of the Christian church in Japan in 1715.50 Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie (Nuremburg, 1675–1679) was the first Western history of art to include a section on Chinese painting. On China, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s compilation of missionary reports, China monumentis qua sacris qua profanes, nec non variis naturae et artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata (Antwerp, 1667), was the key reference for centuries. The reports of 27 missionaries in the Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartari chinoise compiled by Jean-Baptiste du Halde in 1735 later became another important and popular source.51 One of du Halde’s chief contributions was the translation of classical texts in philosophy, history, literature, and other subjects which made available a Chinese canon to Western 18

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

readers for the first time.52 Joseph-Marie Amiot led a team of missionaries to produce 15 volumes titled Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois from 1776 to 1814.53 In another sphere of contact, secular trade, the Dutchman Johannes Nieuhof produced a much consulted account, An Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China in 1669 after his voyage in the mid 1660s. A substantial Western historiography of China was built over the centuries and several European centers including Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Copenhagen acquired important collections of Chinese books and prints.54 The French claim to have founded Sinology. From the beginning, it was characterized by a focus on bibliography and a concern for religion. Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat (1788–1832), self-taught in Chinese, took up the first chair created at the Collège de France in Chinese studies in 1814. As a result of his work on the Chinese texts in the royal library he published the Mémoire sur les livres chinois de la bibliothèque du Roi … avec des remarques critiques sur le catalogue publié par Fourmont, en 1742 (Paris, 1818). Rémusat’s work as the first secretary of the Asiatic Society of Paris, publisher of the Journal Asiatique, important to this day, was foundational for the French focus on systematic bibliography. Rémusat was succeeded at the Collège de France by Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) who translated classical and colloquial Chinese literature. Julien also published on Chinese industries such as porcelain in 1869, a work that Edmond de Goncourt consulted. Somewhat in the vein of Rémusat, Henri Cordier produced the “Catalogue des albums chinois et ouvrages rélatifs à la Chine conservés au Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale” in the Journal asiatique in 1909, and La Chine en France au XVIIIe siècle a year later. Edouard Chavannes (1865–1918), at one time part of the French legation in Beijing and later chair at the Collège de France, trained Paul Pelliot (1878–1945). The latter went to the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi as a research scholar in 1900. Four years later, he led an expedition to Central Asia, in the course of which he famously reached the Dunhuang caves. In 1911, a special chair was created for Pelliott at the Collège de France that he occupied until his death in 1945. Cernuschi, Guimet, and Goncourt each took part in the development of knowledge and intercultural exchange between Europe and East Asia in individual ways through their travels, collections, and exegesis.55 Nineteenth-Century Asian Travel Accounts of Europe A less familiar story is presented by those who traveled in the opposite direction. We now turn to Asian texts on the Euro-American world, which has a much smaller bibliography. Global dynamics and the long restricted mobility of Chinese and Japanese subjects led to very few explorations of distant lands. However, at the very moment that Cernuschi, Duret, Guimet, Régamey, and their colleagues explored East Asia, a growing though still modest number of Japanese and Chinese travelers found themselves abroad on diplomatic and educational missions. Like their Western counterparts, they had the 19

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

goals of investigation and interchange overseas. However, no comparable volume of traffic or large-scale collecting by the Asian envoys was possible or desired. This section will introduce Japanese and Chinese travel journals in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The choice of official and semi-official writing rather than the personal accounts of private visitors was determined by the availability of sources in translation. In this condensed look at a vast field of Asian travel literature, attention will be given not only to the substance, but also to the style of travel writing in relation to pertinent norms. A major difference between the examples below and the work of Duret, Guimet, and Régamey is the voluntary nature of the travel of the Frenchmen. They journeyed for their own purposes, which affected their publications for a general public, whereas the Japanese and Chinese, whether informal or official envoys, served a consultative function for their governments as well as an introduction, in some cases, to a small, elite readership. In this respect the Asian texts were not parallels to Duret’s Voyage en Asie or Guimet’s Promenades japonaises. As diplomatic records, they were akin to the relations of the Macartney embassy to China in 1792, or Perry’s visit to Tokyo in 1853.56 The excerpts by Japanese and Chinese delegates will accordingly tell us more about national concerns than private sensations. Differences abound between European and Asian travel writing, but notable analogies also exist. Authors from both sides made quasi-ethnographic efforts, observing native customs and mores, looking into their histories and religions. Each showed a mix of contempt, appreciation, misunderstanding, and uncertainty about the other. At a basic level, the materials of existence were hard to take: food and dress were constant problems. Westerners no more enjoyed chopsticks and kimonos than Asians liked cutlery, or garments that they found to reveal rather than clothe the body. A most important divergence must be highlighted. While attention to travel itself— how one journeyed from one place to another—is inherent to travel writing, it was not always true of Chinese literature, as the scholar Richard Strassberg has pointed out.57 In the early tradition of Chinese travel writing, the details of actual movement through space were omitted. In notable contrast, the modern Asian examples below shared the self-reflective quality of Western travel writing. The focus on the technologies of mobility was vital at this moment in Chinese and Japanese histories. Not an idle curiosity, the investment in modern transport would shape national defense. The issue is further connected to our study, as the material experiences of travel, the labors and negotiations, the physical proximity, and cultural distances would impinge on the work of Guimet and Régamey to be examined in Chapter 3. Travel undermined the Frenchmen’s authority, as I will show. Actual movement didn’t do much for the influence of Chinese envoys at home either: their European reports to the throne achieved none of their modernizing goals. Not only did their many exhortations to Chinese development fall on deaf ears, in some cases recommendations for reform created a backlash at the end of the nineteenth century. Our attention to their attention is thus required. By observing the self-referential depiction of movement in Asian travel journals, we will better understand their larger historic importance. 20

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

Japanese Travel Accounts The first Japanese embassy abroad since the seventeenth century was to the United States in 1860 to ratify the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Subsequent missions took place in 1862, 1867 (Exposition Universelle in Paris), and in 1872–1873. In all instances, the envoys were charged with gathering information useful to Japan in addition to specific treaty negotiations or ratifications. The first legation led by Shimmi Masaoki in 1860, however, produced little knowledge of American institutions and industries. Limited by poor to no language skills and other constraints, delegates could only turn to details of negligible value, such as the size of ships and buildings, the forms of ordinary furniture and modern amenities.58 In his report, Shimmi’s deputy ambassador, Muragaki Norimasa, former governor of the treaty ports of Hakodate and Yokohama, commented on the more important issue of technologies of weapon-making that “would contribute greatly to the enhancement of our national interests.” He also recommended a future dispatch to America to study navigation and surveying.59 As for travel, the author, like his compatriots on the embassy, found himself in a constant state of temporal, spatial, and dietary alienation. According to Muragaki, “it is well beyond the power of my pen to describe what we, the Japanese, suffer on our journey to a foreign country.”60 The most powerful lesson for Japanese travelers to Europe and the United States took place before they even left Asia. Departing from Yokohama or Nagasaki, each legation had what was in effect a guided tour of the British Empire.61 Their first stop on their crossing of two to three months was either Shanghai or Hong Kong, where they saw a level of commercial activity greater than any in their own treaty ports. Continuing westward, they saw still more. The official named Kawaji Torō of the 1862 embassy to Europe, led by Takenouchi Yasunori, remarked that “it is truly astonishing to witness the power and prosperity of Britain as we have done. Rich lands in Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Aden and the strategic islands of the Red Sea are all under British control.”62 This was just what Britain wanted to show: annoyed that the first Japanese embassy went to the U.S., the British minister Rutherford Alcock negotiated this tour in 1862 “to open the eyes of the Japanese to the power and wealth of Great Britain.” His French counterpart in Japan, Duchesne de Bellecourt, thought along the same lines.63 And Kawaji and his colleagues got the message: “I can only deplore the way in which all the lands of the East have been left so exposed and defenseless,” he wrote, “and cannot but hope that Japan will make haste in raising a navy, take action around the world and illuminate the power of the Emperor.”64 With even greater alarm Sano Tsunetami, head of the Japanese delegation to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, wrote upon seeing Hong Kong, “I was struck by the realization that we have to become hardened to the cruel reality of our own situation without delay if Japan is to avoid being overrun like China,” by that time soundly defeated by Western powers in two opium wars.65 It is useful to return briefly to Western accounts to note that Europeans were also bothered by the long distance voyage, but for different reasons. Théodore Duret (1838– 1927) stated his wonder at the machines that connected all points of the world, a recurring motif in travelogues of the time. “We have just followed this itinerary [Paris, London, Liverpool, New York, San Francisco and Yokohama],” he recounted in Voyage en Asie, 21

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

“and really on arriving in Japan we had no impression of the immensity of the distances nor of any displacement.”66 He was writing as a tourist avant la lettre, that is, before the later phenomenon of mass tourism, but he implied that globetrotting was already routine. “I don’t even know if it is worth mentioning … that the schedules of the big steamships sailing between the different countries of Asia are as regular today as the omnibus service on your street.”67 The Frenchman was clearly ambivalent about the machinery of communication, the very means of Western power in the region that so alarmed their Japanese contemporaries. With regard to Asian travel accounts, we need to look at the tone in addition to the official, documentary nature of such texts. The literary scholar Masao Miyoshi highlights particular features of the Shimmi legation reports on the United States.68 To begin, this corpus of forty-odd untranslated diaries contained almost no personal feeling. Each entry opens with a record of time, weather, and location, particularly the coordinates of latitude and longitude at sea. In some cases, that was the entire account of the day. Those who went on to record events did so without any analysis or reflection. Miyoshi argues that such details of their passage reflect a loss of bearings: as a landlocked people limited to small regions long defined by myth, literature, and customs, the great majority of each legation found themselves at sea in every sense. Their ship’s coordinates would have been not only a point of reference, but also reassurance, however minimal. Their disorientation yielded facts rather than impressions. One of many examples: “today we left Baltimore and traveled ninety-eight miles to Philadelphia, stayed at a hotel called the Continental with seven storeys occupying about a hundred ken square of land, having crossed on the way three rivers, two of which had iron bridges with railroad tracks on them.”69 Further to spatial alienation was a chronometric one, as Miyoshi remarks. The Japanese used a lunar calendar until 1873, and a distinct numbering of hours; they had to make constant adjustments to a foreign system that added to the confusion. So did the Chinese, who used the lunar calendar for days and months, the reign of each emperor to count years, and even their own system of counting hours.70 Beyond the psychological factor were traditions of writing. One model dating to the ninth century was the daily chronicle of events and court ceremonies. Despite the changes in non-literary diaries over time, the convention of brief, neutral entries, details of weather, and neglect of narrative organization survived into the Tokugawa era.71 The Shimmi embassy journals were mostly logbooks without private sentiment or interest. Grammar and syntax in Japanese also create an anonymous tone: sentences can be written without pronouns, especially in the nominative case, and the conjugation of verbs makes no reference to the person of the subject.72 Furthermore, most diaries were written by middling and lower members who, obliged to record a program in which they had no say and events in which they played no active part, accurately wrote in the passive voice. Only the leaders wrote in the first person. On the whole, the collection of Shimmi legation journals reflected social norms. Emotions were allowed only when appropriate: if a situation would typically cause happiness, then so it was expressed in a conventional terminology. Events were not given intimate meaning, unlike accounts by both Western officials and private visitors in which all encounters were personalized and to some degree dramatized. 22

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

The most telling Japanese travel accounts emerged from Prince Iwakura Tomomi’s embassy to the United States and Europe in 1871 to 1873.73 In addition to major political goals, the entourage was to report on elements of Western civilization that would be useful to the Meiji government. Five ministries gave the 108 men a massive list of queries.74 The Iwakura Mission would make no headway on treaty revisions, but the group collected information over 19 months that would play a key role in Japan’s transformation. Iwakura’s secretary, Kume Kunitake (1839–1931,) compiled a five-volume account published by the Council of State in 1878. Its importance is shown by the four reprints by 1883 of Kume’s Tokumei Zenken Taishi Bei-Ō kairan Jikki (The True Version of the Tour of the Special Embassy to the United States and Europe). Further evidence of its value lies in its translation in English in 2002 and most recently in 2009.75 Kume, like Muragaki, deputy ambassador of the 1860 legation, noted the hardships assumed in the name of national interest. His style and tone make for enjoyable reading. “We spent our days on trains with screaming wheels and screeching whistles, careering through billowing clouds of smoke amid belching flames and the smell of iron. Soot and smoke caked our bodies and flew into our eyes.”76 After such a preface, Kume informed his readers in a factual mode, opening each chapter on a foreign country with a survey of its geography, climate, population, history, manufactures, trade, industry, religion, and customs. He did the same for major cities. The secretary recorded the activities of Iwakura and his immediate entourage, and began each entry in the form established by his forerunners. “December 9th [1872]. Rain. At seven o’clock in the morning we left by train for Sandringham, where the Prince of Wales entertained us to lunch.”77 On occasion, he included a brief mention of larger events in a characteristically neutral tone. “[ January 9th, 1873]: Fine. Today Napoleon III died in England after suffering from bladder stones.” By chance the envoys went to Père-Lachaise cemetery the following day, a visit that drew a comment on the Paris Commune. “More than three hundred men lost their lives among the graves,” Kume remarked, “and blood flowed down the wide sloping road from a mountain of corpses.”78 The Japanese thus acknowledged both the intra-European war as well as French internal rebellion. At the same time that Duret and company listed the archaic vehicles of Asia, the Japanese group scrutinized Western transport. (The British engineers were helping to build the first railway between Yokohama and Tokyo at that very moment.) Among the many described by Kume were the urban “street-cars” or “omnibuses” in American cities. “The routes are fixed and the street-cars stop at designated points,” he noted. “The larger ones resemble train carriages, and they are pulled by several horses and can carry up to fifty people.”79 Kume declared the mail-boat that took them across the English Channel “a most beautiful vessel, about two hundred feet in length.” He added that “there were no cabins on the main deck, but there were two or three large saloons on the deck below.”80 Kume was both a dazzled tourist and a focused observer. He recorded the most symbolic part of the French capital, on the Champs Elysées between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde. There, “gas-lamps shine like strings of pearls and light up the paving stones of the boulevards below.” He took care to describe the road surfaces of Paris, “covered with small stones embedded in the ground, with fine 23

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sand strewn on top, as white as though it has been washed.” What appeared to be paving stones, the secretary added, were the result of a new cementing technique in which “gravel is heated with a kind of tar, which when cooled sets as hard as stone to form a seamless road surface.”81 Its advantage was the smooth passage of wheels. All such information was to facilitate Japan’s modernization. Intra-European comparisons were helpful in this regard. “In London the clattering of carriage wheels was so deafening that the horses could not be heard at all. In the streets of Paris the noise of carriage wheels is muted, and all one hears is the sound of hooves.”82 Another contrast put the British metropolis behind as well as below: “in London there were railways lines underneath the streets, roads at ground level and railway lines running over one’s head, and people rush around on three different levels as they go about their daily business.”83 In contrast, elegant Parisians ambled in the city’s parks. Among all the countries on the tour, Kume most admired France, just as French and other Europeans preferred Japan to other Eastern countries on their voyage. The world leader in manufacturing, he stated, France “rivals Italy in sculpture and oil-painting, and competes with Britain in large-scale engineering works such as steam-powered iron warships, cannon and rifles, and buildings and bridges”; its people are “bold in spirit and have a vivacious nature and an animated style of speech.”84 However, and in keeping with the universal practice of making sweeping judgments about foreign peoples, Kume observed that “the French find it difficult to maintain a co-operative spirit for long” which explained their century of revolution.85 For their survey the Japanese went to key sites in Paris and its environs, including the manufactures of Sèvres, the Mint, the military academy of Saint-Cyr, and the Bibliothèque Nationale on rue Richelieu, among many others. Kume held more trenchant views than the earlier group of delegates. On watching a trial in the supreme court, he noted the incompatibility of the French system with his own. The organization of lawyers, judges, and jury would never work in Japan: none of his compatriots knew the law well enough to act as qualified barristers, any jury would be too intimated to do anything other than follow the opinions of authority figures, and no witness would tell the truth for fear of the hostility of convicted, or the “everlasting resentment” of the dead.86 Neither he nor his colleagues advised a wholesale import of Western institutions. It is of more than touristic or anecdotal interest that the Paris sewers made the biggest impression on their tour of French industry and technology. Kume marveled at the subterranean network of tunnels, pipes, and even telegraph cables; in a vivid passage he described their journey in hand-pulled trolleys to watch men and machines working deep below ground. The author pronounced the system of waste removal to be “one of the most awe-inspiring sights of Paris” and the greatest feat of engineering.87 In general, he stressed the role of transport to national might, as vital as the circulatory system of living creatures. Accordingly, efficient waste evacuation was fundamental. Traffic was a diagnostic tool: “we found that as we travelled through a particular country the condition of its roads would reveal to us immediately whether its government was vigorous or in decline and whether its industry and commerce were active or sluggish.”88 In this vein, Kume reported Western ingenuity to his official readers: 24

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition The Europeans never carry loads on their shoulders, and horses in Europe do not carry goods on their backs, yet the volume of freight transported by road in Europe is a thousand times greater than elsewhere. It is imperative to understand the reason for this. Europeans put the effort which they would otherwise use to carry goods themselves into the upkeep of their roads, and instead of using horses as pack-animals they exploit the power of the wheel.89

Modern transport would be crucial to Japanese wealth and power, as it was for all advanced nations. Kume underlined this point in several chapters. He ended with the striking image of “the ports and harbours of the West … filled with forests of masts.” The result: “the ever-increasing number of travellers and goods transported bring ever-greater profits.”90 This, Japan would achieve within a few decades. Moreover, its new military strength lifted its position from pupil to ally when Japan joined Western powers to defeat the Chinese Imperial Army and capture Beijing in 1901. Chinese Travel Writing Scholars like Richard Strassberg have examined Chinese travel writing from the first century onward, noting its literary and epistemological models that wholly differed from European foundations.91 Travel writing was not accepted as a literary genre until the eleventh century. Both authors and readers were mainly degree-holding literati and officials, whose journeys almost never exceeded Chinese borders. Divided in two main categories, the historiographic and the literary travel account, the first served ideological functions of reaffirming a moral code and statecraft, while the lyrical form, long written in poetry, included subjective, individual facets in a historiographic, narrative framework. The actual journey to a particular site received little treatment in many cases, Strassberg writes, for it was “the pattern of shifting observations and responses to the environment” that mattered.92 By the Tang dynasty (690–704 CE), standard itineraries were created for the official class that would dominate for centuries. Alongside the canon of travel writing that was established by the end of the Sung dynasty (960–1279 CE) were new forms such as the exilic account of discredited officials and the documents for court use of envoys to border states. The latter were precursors of the European reports of the late nineteenth-century Qing era.93 The earliest extant first-person relation of a journey was by a Han dynasty courtier in 51 CE.94 Over the centuries, accounts of explorations beyond the Chinese empire comprised only a fraction of the travel writings. The excursions of Cheng Ho (Zheng He, 1371–1435) to South Asia and Africa in 1430–1431 led to reports of little impact.95 Another, Wang Dayuan (ca.1311–?), traveled possibly in the same region and wrote one of the few early accounts based on personal experience of maritime Asia.96 In the early nineteenth century, the only description of Europe by a Chinese who had actually set foot on the continent came from an illiterate sailor who worked on European ships.97 China would not send its first delegates to Europe until 1866, when Robert Hart, the Inspector-General of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, offered to take Chinese students with him on his brief return to Britain.98 Three young men chaperoned by a Manchu official named Pin Chun (Bin Chun, 1803–?, 斌椿) were chosen by the 25

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Chinese Foreign Office.99 One of the students was Chang Te-Yi (Zhang Deyi, 1847–1919, 張德彝), then a 19-year-old student of English, who was later China’s minister to England from 1901 to 1905.100 This educational tour had no diplomatic status or responsibility, as the Qing Foreign Office stated in its petition to the throne. Its sole mandate was “make a record of the geographical aspects and manners and customs of all the countries through which they [might] pass .…”101 China dispatched three more groups abroad between 1868 and 1876. In chronological order, from 1868 to 1871, the American minister in Beijing, Anson Burlingame, took two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six students from Beijing, and a considerable retinue to the U.S. In 1871, Ch’ung-hou (1826–1893), superintendent of trade for the treaty ports of Tientsin (Tianjin), Chefoo (Yantai), and Newchuang, went on a mission of apology to France for the destruction of a French church in Tianjin and the killing of several missionaries and consuls. In 1873, China sent Commissions of Investigation to Peru and Cuba.102 Educational trips to the U.S. occurred between 1872 and 1881. In 1877, China joined the Western diplomatic regime when it named its first ambassadors to Britain, France, and Germany. In 1878, the first Chinese minister presented his credentials to the White House. Our focus now is not modern diplomatic history, which cannot be adequately treated here, but excerpts of Chinese travel writing that importantly give us an idea of their voice and style, even in translation. The Chinese travelers on the Hart expedition, like the Japanese, were eyewitness to the military and commercial power of the French in Indochina and British control in the region extending from Hong Kong to Suez. In France, England, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Russia the Chinese group found courteous royal receptions; in each country they toured the key cultural, institutional, and industrial sites. Paris was uniformly thought the greatest of all the capitals: the delegates admired the elegant boulevards, parks, and innumerable diversions, the beauty of French women and food.103 In London the young men found a violent reminder of European power when they saw the exhibition of loot from Yuanming Yuan.104 Pin produced two journals of the five-month excursion, and the young student Chang (Zhang), his own account; all three texts are untranslated.105 They meticulously recorded every novelty, from the ship that took them out of Shanghai to all subsequent encounters. Again, like their Japanese counterparts, they found modern transport an object of wonder. Pin described his first train down to the last detail, from its mechanical actions to the fittings of the compartments, and their number of passengers. Such was his fascination that he took home a working model train.106 In 1868, on his second tour, Chang, now part of the Burlingame Mission to the United States, also described at length the model trains he saw for sale, as well as real trains, omnibuses, and yet another novelty, the bicycle.107 “When you wind it up the wheels go round, the feet move, the head shakes, and the hands use the brakes to speed up or slow down, while he looks from side to side.”108 He pronounced this vehicle found in London “quite fascinating.” As for all travelers, the materiality of movement was key to their activity. Chang was among the few to incorporate more fully his physical senses in his notes. In California, he liked the scent of flowers but not the taste and smell of food.109 “We followed the local custom, toasting with champagne, drinking coffee, holding knives and forks in 26

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition

our hands. In our mouths the taste was like the rank odor of sheep.” The author also described unfamiliar sounds—“a plaintive lili sound like the chirping of an oriole; it was the barbarian women eating their meal. A cacophony of dingdang noises was the sound of all the people wielding their knives and forks.” A student of English, Chang told readers that “the barbarian speech sounds like juijiudongdong.” But he admired the hygiene of American cities and the apparatus that kept them free of the notorious stench of China. And he happily welcomed the sight of American women, whose “fragrant aroma of their whole bodies was enticing.…” In Boston, Chang found ladies “lovely as fairies and lavishly garbed, arrayed in a multitude, beautiful enough to cause cities to fall.” In general, the Chinese were astonished by what they considered “wanton” touching between people. The young visitor commented on “the touching of lips together” between parents and children and the even more disturbing habit of blowing kisses between men and women.110 As for his own touch, he complained of a sore hand and wrist after over two hundred congressmen shook his hand in Washington. But in addition to social practices, he commented on the political system of the United States. The “Party of Hierarchy,” he wrote, regarded blacks as slaves but no longer dared to say so. Their opposite was the “Party of Equality.” Although unfamiliar with democracy, he noted the problem of irreconcilable “selfish interests” that led to deadlock.111 Travel writers have long described foreign lands as a world upside down. The Greek Herodotus claimed that in Egypt, women ran the markets while the men remained indoors to do the weaving. “The women piss standing upright, but the men do it squatting …. They knead dough with their feet but mud with their hands.”112 So, too, the Chinese envoys in Europe. Liu Hsi-Hung (Liu Xihong, 劉錫鴻), ambassador designate to Germany in 1877, wrote in his Personal Records of Travels in Britain that “when I first came to this place, I was very frightened at heart by all that I saw, for everything was strange.”113 “Everything in England is the opposite of China,” he remarked. “In politics, things move from the people to the Sovereign; in family regulations, the wife is honored and the husband has a lower position …. With books they begin from the back and work up to the front. (Every book begins with the last page.)” Liu attributed such deviations in part to geography: “… their country is situated below the centre of the earth. Over them hangs the sky above the far side of the earth. That is why their customs and systems are all topsy-turvy. Even the day and night are reversed .…”114 It is noteworthy that Chang, whose outlook was the very opposite of the reactionary ambassador Liu, made an identical comment on his third trip overseas: There is nothing here that is not the opposite of China. In politics, the people discuss and the ruler obeys; in family regulations, the wife proposes and the husband follows; in writing, they write from right to left [sic]; in books they begin from the back and move to the front; … The reasons for this may be their nature, or it may be on account of their land being situated just on the opposite side of the world to China, so that the customs and systems are just reversed. All of this remains a mystery to us.115

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Kuo Sung-T’ao (Guo Songtao, 1818–1891, 郭嵩燾), who led this group to Britain in 1876, wrote in terms that diverged from both his colleague Liu and his interpreter Chang. As a classical scholar turned reformist, Kuo believed in modernizing Chinese statecraft with what he called “a proper foreign policy” and developing essential infrastructure.116 He pressed these themes throughout his foreign reports. The official began his diary, The Records of an Envoy’s Journey to the West, on the day he left Shanghai in December 1876.117 Like the Japanese travelers, Kuo would systematically list dates, weather, coordinates, followed by varied observations.118 He commented on the history and principles of Christianity (including the first mention of Nestorianism in Tang dynasty sources) in his learning about European civilizations. In one entry on board he wrote about ongoing rituals: Today is the 25th day of the 12th month of the Western calendar, which is traditionally reported to be the birthday of Jesus. There was reading of the scriptures and prayers, with hymn-singing to the accompaniment of a piano, for this is a great festival of the Christian church.119

He also noted, as if a prisoner onboard, that “our food and drink was better than usual.” Kuo mainly recorded his duties in Europe and his petitions to the Qing court for action; the few personal comments were intended for general enlightenment. Given his first duty to convey a letter of regret to Britain for an incident in 1875, Kuo was keenly aware of China’s insecurity. Modernization would offer a key defense.120 The envoy noted that a journey that took two hours by train from London to Ipswich to observe the manufacture of steam locomotives and other engineering products would have taken two to three days in China for the same distance. Such was the value of transportation that he used the same metaphor as Kume: “the railroads will pass through the country much as blood circulates in the human body,” Kuo wrote to his powerful supervisor, Li Hung-Chang (Li Hongzhang, 1823–1901, 李鴻章) to urge the Chinese development of this vital technology.121 Those very means had allowed Britain “to take advantage of our weak political position to come to us as if instantly over a distance of some seventy thousand li.”122 Kuo would naïvely claim that Russia and England, “the two leading nations of the day,” had no belligerent designs on his homeland, yet he composed a threatening image: “They have surrounded China and press close upon her from spots where they may spy out the land. With their hands reaching high and their feet traveling far, they rise like eagles and glare like tigers, day by day broadening their basis of wealth and power.”123 In his inventory of European transport, Kuo’s concern, like that of the Japanese legations, was plainly more than the mechanics and sensations of going from one place to another. Kuo’s fellow traveler Liu paid equal attention to the devices of mobility as they voyaged to Europe, but he had the opposite view. They were only “tricks” that were irrelevant to millennial Chinese principles. His disregard for Western technologies was equal to Kuo’s appreciation. Liu concluded on seeing his first train, The wonder of such a trick surpasses the magic art of diminishing distances. But if we apply it to China, then the people who bare their thighs and forearms, who hold to the whip and the cord, who row the boats, who pull the carriages, to carry people or cargo, would all lose their jobs.124

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In his view, mechanization would put at risk China’s security. “I think that we ought to hold to our opinions and say outright that the building of railways would not only be harmful to China but would also affect England, since the common [Chinese] people have not yet been appeased in their anger.”125 When pressured by the British, China should “invoke their own laws” of sovereignty in domestic affairs.126 Liu was swayed by neither the London Underground, the world’s first subterranean railway, nor the elevated tracks through the city. He confirmed after seeing trains pass under the Thames that it was “certainly a clever construction, but far from indispensable.”127 Indeed, the voyage only reinforced his opinion. To the same extent that Duret and Cernuschi found China trapped by antediluvian modes, Liu was unimpressed by European ways. These reports must be contextualized in the larger history of Chinese international relations. The Qing regime sent Liu, Kuo, and others only under duress. That China should adopt Western diplomatic forms was stipulated by Britain and France after their victory in the Second Opium War in 1860: the Qing emperor had to acknowledge his equality rather superiority to European monarchs through reciprocal embassies. Being the same as others was more than a nominal concession to Britain. It was a fundamental change in China’s self-conception and approach to foreign contact. Hence, ceremony would be a major concern in Kuo’s embassy. The Chinese asked more than once how the British would present the legation to Queen Victoria in 1876. Liu wrote that, dissatisfied by the vagueness of Sir Francis Seymour, Master-of-Ceremonies in the Queen’s Household, they “looked up the Hsing-yao chih-ch’ang (Handbook of Diplomatic Procedure), which clearly recorded three bows as being required.”128 Chang noted that “we were told that protocol would be the same for us as for the other ambassadors.”129 Indeed, the journals of both Chang and Liu related the formalities at Buckingham Palace in every detail.130 A later ceremony, equally documented, welcomed Kuo as the first Imperial Ambassador of the Great Qing Dynasty to the Court of St. James. Formalities remained important to Kuo’s successors, as we will see. A final travel account by a Chinese diplomat included here is the work of Hsieh Fucheng (Xue Fucheng, 1838–1894, 薛福成), Envoy Extraordinary of China to England, France, Italy, and Belgium in 1891. From the first pages of Hsieh’s travel journal, he noted the etiquette of his reception by foreign heads from Hong Kong to Saigon to Europe. In his comments on the French president, he highlighted not the substance of their first meeting in 1891 but the symbolic double horse-drawn carriage sent to convey him, escorted by a deputy and cavalry brigade, the military band at the gate, and President Sadi Carnot standing at attention “with his hat in hand while I read aloud the imperial greetings.”131 Hsieh had points in common with Kuo other than attention to China’s international rank. He, too, was an intellectual turned bureaucrat who pushed for modernization and self-protection against external threat. And like Kuo, Hsieh reported fears for Chinese security on many occasions. In a uniquely expressive entry of 1890, he wrote, “the Turkish ambassador confided in me with tears in his eyes” that “the nation that is best equipped with powerful cannons and fast battleships can devour any large portion of territory as well, and thus all this talk of international law is sheer nonsense.”132 Hsieh also valued particular institutions from which China could learn. “I was rather 29

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dubious when I first heard Chinese officials who had served abroad singing the praises of the system of government in the West, but having toured Parliament, the schools and prisons from Paris to London, I am totally convinced.”133 The great majority of Hsieh’s writings concerned his diplomatic work. Informal comments, fewer in number, give a sense of what the highest ranking Chinese official in Europe found outside his embassy at Portland Place, London. The ambassador noted during a visit to Italy and Germany that the latter was not as wealthy as France and England, but its people were very polite. The detail that Germans “do not make fun of our clothing” implies a different experience elsewhere. “When they meet us on the street, they remove their hats and bow,” he wrote. “I’ve never met such courtesy before,” remarks that point to the vagaries of foreign encounter not wholly revealed in his journal.134 Even rarer were notes of daily physical experience. About British weather Hsieh wrote: London has been enveloped in dense fog for the past two months, and the city is in almost total darkness, even in the daytime. Tens of thousands of people suffer from coughing spells. I am not accustomed to such a climate and was anxious to leave. In London this morning, the sky was covered with a thick cloud of fog, but as soon as we journeyed some ten miles away from the city, it cleared up, with not a cloud remaining in the sky. After several days of such foul weather I felt exhilarated.135

He enjoyed a different, equally alien sensation when he took the elevator up the Eiffel Tower. “When I reached the top, I felt as if I were floating on clouds high above the earth.”136 Although such comments are only a fraction of the treatment given by Duret and Guimet to their somatic experiences abroad, Hsieh and the Japanese travelers examined above offer a valuable glimpse to the Asian experience in the West. It is important to remark that Goncourt, the armchair traveler, had precisely no interest in the material facts of daily life nor in contemporary Sino-French relations. Instead, he wanted legendary views of Asia and its many arts; he veritably rebuffed the accounts of Cernuschi and Guimet. Now let us turn to their individual projects. Notes 1 François Charpentier, Discours d’un fidèle sujet du roi touchant l’établissement d’une compagnie françoise pour le commerce des Indes orientales: Adressé à tous les François (Paris: 1664), 39. 2 Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: Éditions de la Table Ronde, 1972). Expanding on Girardet’s notion of a “conscience coloniale,” younger historians have examined a “culture coloniale” of literature, moving and still images, exhibitions from 1871 onward. See Sandrine Lemaire and Nicolas Bancel, eds., Culture coloniale en France. De la Révolution française à nos jours (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2008). 3 Robert Lee, France and the Exploitation of China 1885–1901: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Hong Kong and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 10. Also Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism 1871–1914. Myths and Realities (London: Pall Mall, 1964). John Cady, The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954).

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The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition 4 Girardet, L’Idée coloniale, 41–8. 5 David Porter, Ideographia : The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 193. 6 Frances Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese. Treaty Port Life in China 1843–1943 (London: John Murray, 1998), 12. 7 I draw on Paul S. Ropp, China in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 102–6 for the following. 8 Porter, Ideographia, 203, citing Macartney, 1793–1794. 9 James L. Hevia, English Lessons. The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 70. See also Gregory Blue, “Opium for China. The British Connection,” in Opium Regimes. China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, eds. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 36. 10 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 300–301. 11 Lee, France and the Exploitation of China.  12 Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese, 196. See also the most recent study by Robert A. Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 13 Amongst the considerable literature on the subject, I have relied on Hevia, English Lessons; Stanley F. Wright, China’s Struggle for Tariff Autonomy, 1843–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938); Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Resat Kesaba, “Treaties and Friendship: British Imperialism, the Ottoman Empire and China in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 215–42; T.G. Otte, The China Question. Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894–1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); S.Y. Teng, The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971); and Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities. Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 14 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Britain and China,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 148. 15 Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye. Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 9. 16 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 300. John R. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856– 1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 390, 396. 17 Osterhammel, “Britain and China,” 161. At the time of writing this chapter, a new monograph by Julia Lovell offers copious evidence that many Han Chinese who felt no loyalty to the Manchu Qing regime colluded in the opium trade and provided crucial assistance to the British. Thus, Lovell challenges a politically skewed historiography of the Opium Wars that has become the orthodoxy of both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties without denying British culpability in its aggression. See Julia Lovell, The Opium Wars: Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011). 18 I draw on Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism:. The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004). Also Brook and Wakabayashi. 19 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “From Peril to Profit. Opium in Late-Edo to Meiji Eyes,” in Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes, 62.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 20 Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 1. The ports were Shimoda, Hakodate, Kanagawa, Nagasaki, Niigata, Hyogo, Edo, and Osaka. 21 Richard Sims, “France. 16 December 1872 – 17 February 1873, 15–20 July 1873,” in The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe. A New Assessment, ed. Ian Nish (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998), 69–85. 22 W.G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 95. 23 Ibid., 96. 24 Lee, France and the Exploitation of China, 10. Lee cites earlier historians such as Brunschwig, French Colonialism 1871–1914, and Cady, The Roots of French Imperialism, who also argued that economic gain was less important than the recovery of national pride after 1871. 25 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 98. 26 See Elisabeth de Touchet, Quand les Français armaient le Japon. La Création de l’arsenal de Yokosuka 1865–1882 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003). Richard Sims, French Policy Towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan 1854–95 (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1998), 97. 27 Brigitte Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé. Edmond de Goncourt et Hayashi Tadamasa (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 162. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 146. 28 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 104. 29 See Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, especially 176–200. 30 Sims, French Policy, 98. 31 Ibid., 120. 32 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 113–16. 33 Japan challenged even the British export of coal to East Asia by the end of the nineteenth century, as noted in one among many examples, by Judex’s letter to the editor in Financial News, June 2, 1896, reprinted as “Go-Ahead Japan” in The Bimetallist 11, no. 1 (London: Horace Marshall and Sons, 1896): 126–8. 34 Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 176–200. 35 Before his voyage Théodore Duret published Les Peintres français en 1867 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867). After his return, he brought out Les peintres impressionnistes Claude Monet; Sisley; C. Pissarro; Renoir; Berthe Morisot (Paris: Heymann and Perois, 1878). 36 See Beatrice Bodart-Bailey and Derek Massarella, The Furthest Goal. Engelbert Kæmpfer’s Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Sandgate: Japan Library, 1995), especially 108. See also Bodart-Bailey’s annotated translation of unedited manuscripts in Kæmpfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 37 Deborah Johnson, “Japanese Prints in Europe Before 1840,” The Burlington Magazine 124, no. 951 ( June 1982): 344. 38 Engelbert Kæmpfer, The History of Japan, Giving an Account of the Ancient and Present State and Government of that Empire; of Its Temples, Palaces, Castles and Other Buildings …, trans. J.G. Scheuchzer (London: Hans Sloane, 1727–1728). Also see Weisberg and Weisberg, Japonisme, 3, 4, 123. Timon Screech, ed., Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775–1796 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3­–4, states that Kæmpfer’s work was the foundation of all later study of Japan.

32

The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition 39 Weisberg and Weisberg, Japonisme, 304. 40 Carl Peter Thunberg, Flora Japonica: sistens plantas insularum japonicarum; secundus systema sexuale emendatum redactas (Lipsiae: J.G. Mülleriano, 1784). 41 See Arlette Kouwenhoven and Matthi Förrer, Siebold and Japan: His Life and Work (Leidein: Hotei Publishing, 2000), 76. 42 Carl Peter Thunberg, Resa uti Europa, Africa, Asia, förrättad ären 1770–1779 (Upsala, 1788–1794). 43 Screech, Japan Extolled and Decried, 1. 44 Ibid., 22–3. J.W. Spalding published his own account, The Japan Expedition:Japan and Around the World. An Account of Three Visits to the Japanese Empire with Sketches of Madeira, St. Helena, Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Ceylon, Singapore, China, and Loo-Choo (New York: Redfield, 1855). 45 Kouwenhoven and Förrer, Siebold and Japan, 76. 46 Johnson, “Japanese Prints,” 345. 47 Donna Mehos, “Dutch Ethnographic Museums in the European Context,” in A New History of Anthropology, ed., Henrika Kuklick (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 183–4. See also Kouwenhoven and Förrer, Siebold and Japan, 88–9. 48 Johnson, “Japanese Prints,” 347. See also Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé, 13–14 on the Goncourts’ visit in 1861 to the Musée Siebold. 49 Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale du Japon;où l’on trouvera tout ce qu’on a pu apprendre de la nature & des Productions du Pays, du Caractère & des Coûtumes des Habitans, du Gouvernement & du Commerce, des Révolutions arrivées dans l’Empire dans la Religion;et l’examen de tous les auteurs, qui ont écrit sur le même sujet (Paris: Pierre-François Giffart, 1736; nouvelle edition Paris: J-M Gandouin, 1754). 50 Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’établissement, du progrès et de la décadence du Christianisme dans I’empire des japons (Rouen: 1715). 51 Jean-Baptiste du Halde, ed., Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise: enrichie des cartes générales et particulières de ces pays, de la carte générale et des cartes particulières du Thibet, & de la Corée, & ornée d’un grand nombre de figures & de vignettes gravées en taille douce (Paris: Le Mercier, 1735). See Theodore Nicholas Foss, “Reflections on a Jesuit Encyclopedia: Du Halde’s Description … de la Chine (1735),” 67–77, in Actes du IIIe colloque international de sinologie, 1980, Centre de Recherches interdisciplinaire de Chantilly (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983). 52 Charles Le Gobien and Yves Mathurin Marie Tréaudet de Querbeuf also published letters and reports from Jesuit missionaries in 26 volumes as Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: J.G. Merigot le jeune, 1780–1783). Letters on China and the Indies appeared in volumes 10 to 16. Foss, 73–5. 53 Joseph-Marie Amiot, François Bourgeois, Pierre-Martial Cibot, Aloys Poirot, Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois (Paris: Nyon aîné, 1776–1814). 54 See the recent studies and illustrations in Marcia Reed and Paola Demattè, eds., China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007).

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 55 For other examples, see French anthologies of excerpts: Nouvelles lettres édifiantes et curieuses d’ExtrêmeOrient par des voyageurs lettrés chinois à la Belle époque 1866–1906, trans. André Lévy (Paris: Seghers, 1986). Patrick Beillevaire, ed., Le Voyage au Japon. Anthologies de textes français, 1858–1908 (Paris: R. Laffont, 2001). Ninette Boothroyd et al., eds., Le voyage en Chine: anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux, du Moyen âge à la chute de l’Empire chinois (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992). Subsequent editions of Le voyage en Chine appeared in 1997, 2001, 2004. 56 An Embassy to China: being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ienlung, 1793–1794, trans. J.L. Cranmer-Byng (London: The Folio Society, 2004). George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of and Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 3 vols. (London: G. Nichol, 1797). Matthew Calbraith Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, 1856 (New York: D. Appleton, 1856). Also Spalding, Japan Expedition. 57 Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 1–56. 58 See Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 59, 66 for illustrations of bathtubs and chandeliers, for example. 59 Ibid., 64. 60 Ibid., 63. 61 Andrew Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain: Early Travel Encounters in the Far West (Richard, Surrey: Japan Library/Curzon Press, 1998), 45. 62 Ibid., 60. 63 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 72. 64 Cobbing, Japanese Discovery, 60. 65 Ibid., 56. 66 Duret, Voyage, 3, “Nous venons de suivre cette voie, et réellement, en arrivant au Japon, on n’a aucune impression de l’immensité des distances et de l’éloignement.” 67 Ibid., 203–4, “Je ne sache même pas qu’il vaille la peine de mentionner que, partis de Batavia par un bateau qui correspond à Singapore avec les bateaux des Messageries venant de Chine, nous avons été amenés à Ceylan par l’Hougly. Tous ces itinéraires des grands paquebots entre les diverses terres d’Asie sont aujourd’hui aussi réguliers que ceux des omnibus qui passent par votre rue. Nous avons donc presque jamais parlé de nos parcours de mer, et n’en parlons non plus en cette occasion, renvoyant pour les renseignements au Livret-Chaix ou à Bradshaw.” 68 In this section I rely on Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them. The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley, L.A., London: University of California Press, 1979), 97–141. 69 Ibid., 103. 70 See, for example, all the entries by the Chinese ambassador in Helen Hsieh Chien, The European Diary of Hsieh Fucheng: Envoy Extraordinary of Imperial China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 71 Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, 108–11. 72 Ibid., 112. 73 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 157. The treaties were those signed with the US in 1858 and others subsequently with Prussia, Belgium, Denmark, and Italy.

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The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition 74 Ibid., 160. 75 Kume Kunitake, Tokumei Zenken Taishi Bei-Ōkairan Jikki, 5 vols. (Tokyo, Hakubunsha, 1878). The translation of 2002 is titled The Iwakura Embassy 1871–1873: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). In 2009 a new, abridged translation was published as Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, eds. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). I cite the latter edition. 76 Kume, Japan Rising, 5. 77 Ibid., 208. 78 Ibid., 233. 79 Ibid., 57. 80 Ibid., 218. 81 Ibid., 220. 82 Ibid., 221. 83 Ibid., 222. 84 Ibid., 215, 217. 85 Ibid., 214. 86 Ibid., 250. 87 Ibid., 239–40. 88 Ibid., 472. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 478–9. 91 I particularly draw on Strassberg’s introduction to Inscribed Landscapes, 1–56. See also Wai Tsui, “A Study of Wang Tao’s (1828–1897) Manyou suilu and Fusang youji with Reference to Late Qing Chinese Foreign Travels” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2010). For key English translations of Chinese travel writing, see Knight Biggerstaff, “The First Chinese Mission of Investigation Sent to Europe,” Pacific Historical Review 6, no. 4 (December, 1937); J.D. Frodsham, trans., The First Chinese Embassy to the West. The Journals of Kuo-Sung-T’ao, Liu Hsi-Hung and Chang Te-Yi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Charles Desnoyers, “Self-Strengthening in the New World: A Chinese Envoy’s Travels in America,” Pacific Historical Review 60, no. 2 (May, 1991): 195–219; Desnoyers, “‘The Thin Edge of the Wedge’: The Chinese Educational Mission and Diplomatic Representation in the Americas, 1872– 1875,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 2 (May, 1992): 241–63; R. David Arkush, ed., Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Zhang Deyi, Diary of a Chinese Diplomat (Beijing: Chinese Literature Press, 1992); and Helen Hsieh Chien, The European Diary of Hsieh Fucheng. 92 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 25–6. 93 Ibid., 48–56. 94 Ibid., 23, 59–62 for an excerpt of Ma Ti-po (Ma Dibo 馬弟伯), Court Gentleman to the Emperor Guangwu (reign 25–57 CE), A Record of the Feng and Shan Sacrifices. Where possible I give in parenthesis the pinyin form and Chinese names using traditional Chinese characters. For consistency I use the older romanized spelling to match published translations and existing scholarship.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 95 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 9, 426. 96 Roderich Ptak, “Glosses on Wang Duyuan’s Daoyi zhilüe (1349/50),” Récits de voyage des Asiatiques. Genres, mentalités, conception de l’espace, ed. Claudine Salmon (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1996), 127–41. 97 Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, xx. The remarks of the sailor Hsieh Ch’ing-kao (Xie Qinggao, 1765–1821, 謝清高) were compiled in the early nineteenth century as Record of the Seas or The Maritime Notes (Hai-lu). See Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 594. 98 I draw from the summary given by Biggerstaff, “First Chinese Mission,” 307–20. 99 The government school was T’ung Wen Kuan (Tongwen Guan), or Office for Unified Language school, founded in 1862. The Englishman E.C. Bowra and his French colleague E. de Champs, both of the Maritimes Customs, served as interpreters for the 1866 excursion. 100 Biggerstaff, “First Chinese Mission,” 310; the other two were Yeng Hui, a student in the English department of T’ung Wen Kuan (Tongwen Guan); and Feng I in the French department. 101 Cited by Biggerstaff, “First Chinese Mission,” 310. 102 See Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, xxvii–xxviii, and Arther W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912) (Taipei: Literature House, 1964), vol. 1, 209–10. 103 Biggerstaff, “First Chinese Mission,” 312. 104 Ibid., 313. 105 Zhang Deyi, Hanghai shuqi (A Narrative of the Strange Encounters of My Voyage), 1866. 106 Biggerstaff, “First Chinese Mission,” 313. 107 Zhang, Diary of a Chinese Diplomat, 160, 165–6, 187, 200–201. 108 Ibid., 166. 109 See Arkush, Land Without Ghosts, 32–40, for the following excerpts. 110 Ibid., 38. 111 Ibid., 40. 112 Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 145–6. 113 Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, 118. 114 Ibid.,148–9. 115 Ibid., 171–2, undated journal entry between 1876 and 1878. 116 Ibid., xxviii–xxxi. Before his British post Kuo was variously the Grain Intendant, Acting-Governor, and Judicial Commissioner of different provinces. Kuo’s Memorial on Foreign Affairs Submitted on the Occasion of the Termination of his Leave of Absence (1875) is translated in ibid., 88–96. 117 Guo Songtao, Shixi jicheng: Guo Songtao ji (Shengyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1994). 118 Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, 13, “28th day [December 13, 1877]. Raining. At 11 am we reached Singapore, latitude 1.20 north, after a run of 720 li.” One li is roughly 1/3 mile or 0.555 kilometres.

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The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition 119 Ibid., 30. 120 The cause of China’s apology was the murder of Augustus R. Margary, a consular interpreter in 1875. See Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, Appendix, 186–7, for a translation of the official apology from the Emperor of China to Queen Victoria in archives, F.O. 17/768. 121 Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, 103. 122 Ibid., 98. 123 Ibid., 73. 124 Liu Hsi-hung, Journal of a Voyage to England in ibid., 114, December 14, 1876. 125 Ibid., 110, November 1876. 126 Ibid., 115. 127 Ibid., 133. 128 Ibid., 118. 129 Chang Te-yi, Journal of an Embassy Official, 1877, translated in ibid., 155. 130 Ibid., 18 (Liu), 155 (Chang). 131 Hsieh, European Diary, 12. 132 Ibid., 13. 133 Ibid., 16. 134 Ibid., 69. 135 Ibid., 59. 136 Ibid., 14.

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2 Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Cernuschi’s Collection and Reappraisals of Europe and Asia

The premise of this book is that existing methods in the study of art collecting, collections, and museums have reached a point of diminishing returns. As outlined in the Introduction, the examination of individual and collective needs leaves out the question of how their elected objects related to economic, ideological, and material exchanges. Institutional critique points to these issues, but thus far without specific attention to the history of European collections and museums of Asian objects. On this score, the paradigms of chinoiserie and japonisme, already established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still operative today, do not fully register the complexities of the Euro-Asian exchange. They are important for certain histories of art and cross-cultural interaction; however, the focus on Western reception and reinterpretation undervalues the other stakes involved. The present chapter examines Cernuschi’s collection in order to develop the national and transnational histories outlined in Chapter 1 [Fig. 2.1]. The approach is both micro- and macroscopic. Cernuschi’s biographic contours will be taken into account, but the long familiar narrative of privileged individuals who enjoyed the elite activity of collecting will be interrupted with studies of modern cultural and monetary systems. The topic of precious metals will be at the hub of this chapter, just as it had been the focal point of Cernuschi’s professional activity as well as his collecting. It will be shown that gold, silver, and bronze had a constitutive as well as a symbolic function in modern Euro-Asian contacts. Cernuschi was a figure in this landscape of fluctuating relations between East and West, between the ratio of silver to gold in global markets. His activities were a function of internal changes within France, Japan, and China of their own national and cultural positions.1 The collection, particularly his cast bronze from Japan and China, indexes the unstable ground negotiated by individuals and countries in transnational, cross-cultural relations. Indian art, whose importance is without question, and whose challenge to Western conceptions has been richly examined, was given little place in the Musée Cernuschi founded in 1897; hence it will not be an object of scrutiny here2 [Fig. 2.2]. 39

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

A Fresh Approach to the Musée Cernuschi Known for creating an early and important museum of Asian arts in France, Cernuschi was even more celebrated in his lifetime as a theorist of bimetallism, the harmonized use of gold and silver standards in economic systems. Precious metals had a direct bearing on hegemonic nations and their quarries in the East. The often coerced interaction between the gold economies of Europe and the silver ones of Asia was a reality in Cernuschi’s collection. I will use the question of precious metals to examine his achievement in both material and metaphoric terms. Gold and silver were not only legal tender and age-old materials of art and craft, but also indices of power and prestige. As we will see, West was gold and East was silver. It should be noted, however, that Cernuschi’s promotion of bimetallism was free of such ideological dogma. In the rest of this chapter, I integrate his theory, credited as “a true monetary science” and thus far overlooked by art historians, with his practice as a traveler and collector in Asia. The two are vital, constitutive parts of the history of Euro-Asian contact; the two structure my argument. Yet far from suggesting an accord between monetary theory and collecting practice, I argue for disparity. In this vein, I examine precious metals as they impinged on the valuation of art in different traditions. Parallels coexisted with conflict here: the ratios of gold and silver fluctuated in world trade and so too the appraisal of civilizations. I make no suggestion to apply conversion rates to art history, as in so many European paintings for so many Japanese prints or Chinese porcelains. Instead, by identifying a certain metaphoric relationship we can see how larger political and economic pressures shaped both his theory of bimetallism and his collection. My analysis of economic and monetary histories will show from a different angle the impact of collecting Asian objects at a key turning point in French history after the Franco-Prussian War. To understand the important conceptual shifts involved, I consider such authors as Arthur de Gobineau, Carlo Cattaneo, and Giuseppe Ferrari. Alongside the symbolic functions of gold and silver, I also highlight the concrete ways they operated as money in an increasingly global market. I discuss the impact of Cernuschi’s Asian bronzes on European scholarship and collecting. That his main contribution was Chinese bronze is vital. Unlike porcelains or Japanese prints, ancient cast bronze from China had not been previously available in Europe. Such was the strangeness of these early productions, what the French called “l’art primitive” in the nineteenth century, that they would not become objects of study and collecting for many decades. I will show how collecting and cross-cultural contact affected ideas and methods in Europe as well as Asia in Cernuschi’s lifetime: Japan, in particular, made crucial changes to its own evaluation and classification of art. Furthermore, Japan would draft Western enthusiasts to modify, through their collecting, its standing on the world stage. In brief, the frames of interpretation were shifting in both Europe and Asia in the nineteenth century. To focus on bronze in Cernuschi’s collection immediately begs the question of the world historical epoch called the Bronze Age. Hence, a few words on the period starting from roughly 3,000 BCE, when copper and bronze were used as the chief material for tools and weapons. Increased mining led to the development of an international and interdependent network of technological transfer and metal trade; the commerce in tin 40

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

and copper allowed metallurgists to make bronze alloy.3 Innovations in such technology have been linked to the rise of more complex social formations at the time. Indeed, the beginning of the Bronze Age was the period in which writing, bureaucracy, and centrally organized trade, among other key features, emerged in Mesopotamia.4 What is valuable to our present inquiry on the modern period is neither a review of metallurgy in world history nor of the Bronze Age, but an attention to factors that resonate with our modern inquiry. We find the juncture of two major changes here. From 2,000 BCE onward, new skills in mining and metallurgy and the commodification of their products led to greater economic capacity. Closer to our own time, the supply of gold and silver was crucial to the growth of early modern economies. In the Bronze Age, the socialization of metal—their use in spheres of power, prestige, and ritual—gave it additional value.5 So, too, in modern Europe, when gold and silver played symbolic and evaluative functions. In the briefest terms, metals have long intervened in human history in multiple ways. A Profile of Cernuschi I now shift the discussion away from such a longue durée to a more focused view of Cernuschi the individual. Trained in law at the University of Pavia, his political commitments were formed early.6 He supported the Italian unification movement, the Risorgimento, and played a central role in the insurrection in Milan that drove out the occupying Austrian army in 1848. Still in his twenties, the young man went to Geneva, Florence, and ultimately Rome, where he took part in the unsuccessful battle to overthrow papal rule. These revolutionary efforts led first to his imprisonment, then expulsion in 1850. During his decades of exile in France, he supported Republicans against the Second Empire. Cernuschi invested 600,000 francs in the Republican newspaper, Le Siècle, to which he contributed regular editorials. He also gave 100,000 francs to Léon Gambetta’s effort to oppose the plebiscite of Napoleon III in early 1870, a donation that immediately led to the second expulsion of his life. Cernuschi would return to Paris after a few months, upon the fall of the imperial regime.7 He subsequently naturalized as a French citizen. Cernuschi and his eventual travel companion, Théodore Duret (1838–1927), a French merchant, novice art critic, and collector, lived through the Prussian bombardment, followed by the Paris Commune and its violent suppression in the spring of 1871. He took an active part in defending the capital during the terrible winter of 1870–1871.8 After the Communards’ execution of a Republican colleague Gustave Chaudey, Cernuschi chose to leave the capital for a long voyage.9 Duret cited the same reason in a letter to Camille Pissarro: “I have lost one of my close friends, Chaudey, shot at Ste Pélagie [prison] by the Commune prosecutor. I have only one wish, to leave, to escape Paris for a few months.”10 From September 1871 onward, the pair traveled for over a year through Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Cernuschi, on his first and only Asian tour, bought some 5,000 objects. The events that led to this collection of paintings, albums, porcelain, 41

2.1  Portrait of Enrico (Henri) Cernuschi, Atelier J. Waléry, Paris

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

2.2  Musée Cernuschi foyer, Paris

and above all, bronze works will be examined below.11 On his return to Paris in 1873, he built a private residence in which he kept his collection. Two years later, he bought a suite of European, mostly Italian Renaissance, works from Michele Cavaleri (1813–1890), a lawyer in Milan.12 A convoy of train wagons containing 63,296 antique and modern European paintings, drawings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and books made their way to Paris in 1875. Also included were Egyptian mummies, Chinese sculptures, and archaeological finds. A set of Peruvian pottery that Cernuschi later donated to the Musée américain in Nancy had likely belonged to Cavaleri as well.13 Cernuschi kept the European and Asian components to the end of his life. He bequeathed the latter to the city of Paris and left the European collection to his brother Constantin.14 After his death, the city created the Musée Cernuschi in his mansion on the Avenue Vélasquez in the affluent Haussmannian neighbourhood of Parc Monceau in 1897 [Fig. 2.3]. He shared his private Asian collection by allowing visits to his home and through exhibitions. The first was at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris from September 1873 to January 1874. A year later, Goncourt wrote about a luncheon and private viewing when he saw Cernuschi’s “two thousand bronzes, faiences, porcelains” in July 1875. “Among the bronzes,” Goncourt noted in his diary, “some marvels that seem to be the finest of what taste and the learned art of invention can create.”15 Cernuschi’s generosity was consistent with his Republican ideals and support of a democratic public sphere. Like Guimet, he sought the production and egalitarian diffusion of knowledge. To that end, Cernuschi commissioned Motoyoshi Saizan, a Japanese tutor at the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, to translate the inscriptions on 43

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

several items in his collection.16 He also subsidized the illustration of his objects in the pioneering study by the collector and art critic Louis Gonse, L’Art japonais, published in 1883 and reprinted in 1886.17 The donor further commissioned the artist Henri Charles Guérard (1846–1897) to produce engravings of his collection, presumably also for dissemination.18 Cernuschi’s work as collector has been linked to his cultural and social milieu.19 His acquaintance with the Republican salonnière Hortense Cornu Lacroix, the controversial Orientalist Ernest Renan, and Gustave Flaubert, author of Salammbô, stimulated his interest in archaeology. Cornu Lacroix, a strong force behind the creation of the Musée des Antiquités Nationales, may well have affected his commitment to museums as an institution. Cernuschi would stipulate that no item could be removed from his bequest except as transfers to the Louvre.20 His interests were coherent with his intellectual formation and his longstanding political commitments. Cernuschi’s lifelong friendship with Carlo Cattaneo, author of Dell’india antica et moderna of 1845 and La Cina antica et moderna, and Giuseppe Ferrari, author of La Chine et l’Europe, had a likely impact on his outlook on East Asia.21 The polymathic Cattaneo highlighted similarities between Eastern and Western metaphysics.22 Ferrari, a political theorist and philosopher of history, rejected the prevalent view of China as barbaric and immobile. He argued, to the contrary, that the early Chinese reign of scholarship, equality, and merit based on a uniform language and legislation made for unique advances. In comparison, he wrote, “our inferiority” was shameful.23 Ferrari’s regard for an alleged universality throughout Chinese history emerged from his study of Italian history: in a number of writings he examined Italy’s failure to develop a centralized modern state.24 A lack of unity among diverse groups, he concluded, led to permanent instability, in contrast to the enduring character of the Chinese regime. But although Ferrari idealized China to a large extent, he also found imperfection. The Chinese were long subject to a despotic rule backed by an imperial cult. The West overtook the eastern kingdom when it freed itself from the regime of religion. His most important contention was the synchrony between Europe and China as evident in manifold parallels in their histories. Knowledge of Cernuschi’s life is vital to our understanding, but at this point I will interrupt the story of a valiant activist and collector with another approach. I suggest that Cernuschi’s collection is a vehicle through which we can examine another facet of the material circumstances of France, Japan, and China. Indeed, the broader shifting relations between these three countries were the landscape in which individual and collective recalibrations took place in the late nineteenth century. Manifold Impressions of Japan and China To understand the fluctuating appraisals of Japan and China, and particularly the views of Duret and Cernuschi, we must turn to Western commentary in the nineteenth century. Ange-Maxine Outrey, the French envoy to Japan in the 1870s, was not alone when he declared that “… contrary to what is happening in the other oriental countries and particularly in China, Japan is resolutely and enthusiastically embracing European 44

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

ideas.”25 Writings at the time shared the diagnostic tone of Duret’s Voyage en Asie. Racial theorists claimed that the unifying laws of progress from barbarism to modern civil society were biological rather than political or economic.26 The eighteenth-century naturalist Georges Buffon examined the human species in all its diversity of anatomy and character. He believed the Japanese and the Chinese were of the same race, sharing physical traits and many social practices, and of “very ancient civilization,” in contrast to “les Nègres.”27 Among the substantial European corpus of studies in human diversity, the work of Gobineau, an influential proponent of racial determinism, is notable for its influence. His four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines of 1853 to 1855, reprinted in 1882, repeated the conventional hierarchy: the whites (“les blancs”) at the summit alone acceded to civilization, somewhere in the middle were the yellows (“les jaunes”), inert and utilitarian in nature, and assigned to the bottom, blacks were physically strong but otherwise inept.28 These were “permanent and indestructible” inequalities.29 Civilization the author defined as a state of relative stability in which an intelligent, developed people satisfied its needs through peaceful means.30 Developed societies had superior governance and creations in material, artistic, and intellectual forms. Gobineau saw human history as a vast tapestry in which blacks and yellows were the crude foundation in cotton and wool. What he called the “secondary families of the white race” refined the tapestry with silk. It was the Aryans, the highest group, who created over time, in his metaphor, the “dazzling masterpiece of arabesques in silver and gold ….”31 Thus he correlated peoples and materials in his theory of civilizations. China was ranked in the middle of his scheme, among the secondary families of the white race because Aryans had long ago colonized India, who in turn extended the benefits of civilization to its Chinese neighbor. When the Aryan blood is exhausted, however, stagnation is inevitable among the yellow races, according to Gobineau. It is a sign of his preference for learning at a distance and a fear of the natives that when offered the post of first secretary of the French legation in China in 1859, secured by the Treaty of Tianjin, he thought it a punishment to be avoided.32 Cernuschi left no written statements regarding any theory of civilization. However, Duret’s writing echoed Gobineau when he declared China deficient in both political organization and creative invention. Duret found ancestor worship, the absolutism of the emperor, and an antediluvian education based on archaic texts rather than modern sciences (“nos sciences exactes”) to be major culprits.33 Other failings include the absence of metaphysics, epic poetry, and imagination among the Chinese. He found confirmation of these deficiencies in the great monuments of the empire. On seeing the legendary pagoda of Nanjing, Duret and Cernuschi realized that the famed porcelain was only a veneer applied to crude bricks.34 The Great Wall inspired further contempt: We are especially filled with disdain for this Chinese empire which, with its hundred of millions of inhabitants, could only protect itself by building walls against a few million nomads in Mongolia. As if any empire with a shortage of men has ever been saved by stones!35

China fell short of expectation in every respect.

45

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

In addition to received ideas about different peoples, Duret’s Voyage en Asia must be understood in relation to other travel accounts. He recounted actual experiences and disappointments. According to Charles Forsdick, travelers typically “seek and even rely on diversity to justify their journeying,” and lament the near extinction of local particularities.36 It is an instance of what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has termed “imperialist nostalgia,” a paradoxical, if not hypocritical, longing by the dominant power for that which colonial contact had altered or destroyed.37 Duret and Cernuschi were duly annoyed by the surfeit of European clubs, horse races, and Western newspapers, the French wine and English beer in Yokohama.38 “If I accept the least dinner invitation—and local hospitality is prodigious—I must put on my habit noir and white tie,” Duret recalled. “Not only has Europe become closer to Japan, it has taken root here.”39 In truth, the asymmetrical treaties noted in the Introduction brought some 950 Westerners to reside in Yokohama by 1870, and 10,000 Western seamen to pass through the treaty port every year. Three thousand foreigners were present at any given moment.40 Duret warned that “the old picturesque Japan, the Japanese Japan is disappearing and Europeans in 25 years will look for it in vain.”41 In the same manner he wondered if they had arrived “truly in China and at the far end of Asia.…” Among the large European community in Shanghai the only Chinese element he found were the armies of local servants—“compradores, coolies, porters, boatmen, domestic help of every type and rank.”42 Entire parts of the city were international concessions under complete Western rule. Aside from the material needs of travel, Duret and Cernuschi had little contact with the Chinese. Edward Said’s long-ago statement that every Western traveler in the nineteenth century is aware of belonging to a national power with specific interests in the non-West has lost none of its relevance.43 Duret’s low opinion of native art forms was coterminous with his view of China as trading partner. He warned against the dream of easy gain, emphasizing repeatedly that Chinese habits of consumption made them “the wrong client for the European, who produces and consumes a great deal and has all kinds of needs.”44 Guimet would make the same observation. Duret’s scepticism emerged in part from domestic concerns. France, already burdened with payments to Prussia, could ill afford wrong steps abroad. In Britain, however, involvement with China was cast as a moral imperative. A colonial officer in Hong Kong named R.M. Martin wrote that negligence would produce “serious and perhaps irretrievable calamities.”45 In a report, now in a Public Record Office in London, he argued that Britain’s authority in the world was at stake, hence “greater civil, intellectual, and moral efforts were necessary for the preservation of our position among competitive surrounding nations.”46 His exhortation echoed others in the vast administration of empire. Conditions of Collecting Alongside their political and commercial evaluations of Asia, Duret and Cernuschi made cultural judgments through their collecting activities. The most important result of their journey apparently started by accident. Buying bibelots “is the first thing that 46

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

all Europeans do when they arrive in Japan,” Duret wrote in Voyage en Asie. “We started like everyone else, without fixed plans or preferences, proceeding a bit haphazardly.…”47 Within months Cernuschi would send back to Paris many bronzes in addition to paintings, sculptures, ceramics, books, and photographs.48 Thanks to further acquisitions in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection would have 5,000 items, of which 2,500 were bronze works, 2,000 ceramics, and the rest books, paintings, wood and stone sculptures.49 His suppliers at home included the dealers Siegfried Bing and Philippe Sichel, as well as Ferdinando Meazza, an Italian businessman who brought back porcelain and other objects from Japan.50 The two visitors were much less prolific in their collecting in India and Indonesia. Cernuschi favoured views of the landscapes and monuments of Southeast Asia made by Western photographers such as Samuel Bourne, owner of a studio in Calcutta and Bombay, and Felice Beato, based in Yokohama.51 Duret’s remarks in Voyage en Asie on the sculptures in Hindu temples—“well beyond the limits of art and taste … the Hindu gods are disgraceful and deformed creatures issued from a deranged imagination”— reveals little inclination toward acquisition.52 Such a negative view was standard at the time. As Partha Mitter showed, much of Indian art was considered obscene by Europeans.53 Nothing in Cernuschi’s trajectory suggests the mania for hoarding attributed to the clichéd, obsessive collector. Rather, there is a didacticism comparable to Guimet’s survey of Asiatic religions. Bronze ritual objects were the products of Chinese antiquity, much valued as the highest creation of the ancient Shang dynasty (ca.1700–1500 BCE). The collector revealed that “in China the bronze I saw was so superior that I realized that all the ones I bought earlier in Japan had comparatively little merit.”54 He showed the epistemological bent of his work when he told an accomplice in knowledge production, Eugène Müntz, chief librarian at the École des Beaux-Arts, that his newly acquired objects will allow for the study of “the complex history of bronze in the Far East.”55 Writers on Cernuschi’s collection have embraced its fortuitous origin. In 1889, Philippe Burty noted that it had been formed “somewhat unexpectedly while negotiating the village and city streets”; Pierre Despatys wrote in 1900 that “the travellers had no premeditation and one could almost say that it was by chance that the collection began to take shape.”56 The view is upheld by Michel Maucuer, curator of the Musée Cernuschi today.57 However, an emphasis on this narrative of origin comes at the expense of larger issues. The lack of premedition is in fact less vital to our analysis than the broader conditions of collecting. According to Duret they believed that bronze was “a good line to pursue.”58 Thus, in Tokyo they turned from contingency to organization.59 One intermediary introduced them to local suppliers. “Everyday people sent to Yaki’s house for us bronzes by the hundreds. We made a selection, paid by the lot, and watched our collection grow in the blink of the eye.”60 Duret and Cernuschi were not the only ones to comment on the abundance of local vendors and merchandise. The Austrian diplomat, Joseph-Alexander Hübner, noted that while touring Kyoto in September 1871 that “the best artists of the town came to us today, bringing a heap of curiosities; amongst them there are some real chefs-d’œuvre.”61 Similarly, Guimet declared that “Japan was a land of bibelots and curiosities … nine out of ten merchants were sellers of old antiques.” 47

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

On the Nihon bashi doori, road he and Régamey saw overflowing boutiques on either side. “Bronzes, books, faïence, textiles, toys, antiquities…. The shops stretch out before us as in a dream.”62 Which among Cernuschi’s collection were the first to be acquired in Japan and whether they included Chinese works cannot be determined.63 His most spectacular coup came in December 1871 when he and Duret were taken to an abandoned temple in Meguro on the outskirts of Tokyo.64 They found a four meter high Buddha. Duret recorded the speedy acquisition: We go in search of the owner of the site; he agrees to sell the Buddha, the deal is made; a hammer and wrenches are brought immediately, and the emphatically extended right hand of the Buddha is cut from the arm and given to us to carry away. It is already something to have the hand.65

Scholars have confirmed that the Banryuji temple, home of the icon, was a complete ruin in 1871.66 Archives of the Zōjōji monastery show a request by a certain Kanematsu, made on behalf of two foreigners, to buy the bronze statue for 500 ryō.67 Cernuschi and Duret astutely remained out of sight the next day as a battalion of native labourers dismantled and removed the trophy, much to the distress of local worshippers.68 Duret concluded with evident satisfaction, “the acquisition of the Meguro Buddha magnificently completes our collection of buddhas of which we already have several examples.”69 From that point onward, the metal giant would be the emblem of Cernuschi’s collection. In 1896, even his catafalque was laid at the Buddha’s feet [Fig. 2.3].

2.3  Cernuschi’s Catafalque, Musée Cernuschi, 1896

48

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

2.4  Bronze vessel, jian, in glass case at left, Musée Cernuschi MC 865

Conditions of collecting were different in China, where there was no shortage of antiques on offer. Rather than buying hundreds of items at once, as in Tokyo, the visitors had to bargain hard for one costly specimen at a time. Their tactic included taking a dealer’s entire stock and luring local collectors with high prices.70 Beijing had the most abundant supply, but quantities were also found in Shanghai and Yangzhou.71 Cernuschi would amass the largest collection of Asian bronzes in Europe. Duret remarked that his companion bought “a certain number of characteristic types” of rare, archaic production, such as the oldest work in Cernuschi’s collection, a Shang Dynasty cup (ku), dated to the fifteenth century BCE.72 He also acquired a bronze (jian) of the sixth/fifth centuries BCE, one of the largest ceremonial basins of this type outside China73 [Fig. 2.4]. Other sources confirm a lively market in antiques in China. An English guidebook of 1867 identified areas of Beijing where shops for modern and antique objects, “pictures done in the most approved Chinese style,” and jade articles were to be found. Curiosities, old coins, and bronze articles were available on a street variously transliterated as “Ta-sha-lan or Ta-chan-lan” in the Outer or Chinese City.74 Robert Fortune, the Scottish botanist, wrote in the early 1860s of “Ta-sha-lar,” referring to the same location, “famous for its collections of works of art both ancient and modern.” It was a rich quarry of carved jades and rock crystals, fine porcelain, among other “specimens of great beauty” to be plucked by the connoisseur.75 The art historian Nick Pearce and historian Susan Naquin have further located such shops in an area called Liulichang to 49

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

the west of the central gate of Qianmen in the Outer City, and curiosity dealers near Wumen, the main gate leading to the Forbidden City.76 Some of the more modest vendors delivered their wares to the foreign Legations in Beijing as attested by David Rennie, physician to the British Legation. The latter described an abundant traffic in the wake of Yuanming Yuan’s ruin in 1860.77 Duret himself observed that everyone in the foreign legations dabbled in Chinese antiquities. Here it should be noted, as Stanley Abe has done, that foreigners had no knowledge of ancient Chinese sculpture. Fine works in stone were in the vast interior, hence inaccessible to Westerners in the nineteenth century. Abe cites an article in 1905 in the Burlington Magazine by C.J. Holmes, who wrote that “the nation has never possessed any noble school of monumental sculpture.” In its absence, the author elected bronze objects to “represent the plastic art of the country in its most perfect form.”78 Stone sculptures were available and collected outside China only in first decade of the twentieth century.79 Cernuschi bought in situ bronze vessels called gui (kouei), ding, yi, hu, among over a dozen classifications made over the centuries. As Craig Clunas has shown, the Chinese had long sought an enormous array of such materials; their literature on ancient bronze began as early as the end of the eleventh century CE.80 Archaic ding and dui along with ancient jade were attributed symbolic, cultural, even magical powers, hence numbering among the most coveted. Native buyers, in other words, also exchanged monetized silver for cast bronze artifacts, trading the material value of one metal for the symbolic value of another.81 Metals and Global Monetary Histories In the 1870s, France still maintained both the gold and silver standards, thus Cernuschi had to trade monetized gold and silver for Asian bronze artifacts on his travels. His collection was financed by the wealth he largely accumulated in Paris. The Italian exile had worked for Émile and Isaac Péreire at the Crédit Mobilier, the biggest investment bank in France in his time. During a phase of global economic expansion, Cernuschi stood at the forefront of devising new methods of capitalization at the Paris Bourse and the Banque de Paris.82 He strongly advocated the harmonized minting of both gold and silver at fixed rates. International publications such as reports to the United States Senate duly cited his work and France appointed him its official delegate to the International Monetary Conference in 1881.83 Upon his death, the Association of American Bimetallists laid a wreath for the “Founder of a True Monetary Science,” visible on the far left side of his catafalque in [Fig. 2.3]. The Union bimétallique Allemande and the British Bimetallic League made similar gestures. We need to look at this point at modern economic history to test the analogy between Cernuschi’s bimetallism and his art collection, between the gold-silver ratio and the East–West hierarchy.84 Growing international trade in the nineteenth century led to a desire for a common standard and gold prevailed among major Western powers from the 1870s onward.85 A different course took place in the eastern hemisphere. China would maintain into the 1930s the silver economy that it began to adopt in the 50

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

thirteenth century. So, too, India until the 1890s. By the end of the 1870s, a two-tiered structure roughly divided along the East–West and North–South axes emerged, as the economic historian Ted Wilson remarked.86 The majority of Western European nations were on the gold standard, while much of Asia and South America stayed on silver. It was advantageous for Britain to keep its colony on silver, as the cost of British exports denominated in gold rose while the cost of Indian goods fell when the silver to gold ratio dropped from 15 to 1 in the early 1870s to 35 to 1 in the 1890s. The harm caused by a hegemonic gold standard on the economies of India and China, as Mike Davis has examined, was ruinous in very concrete ways for Asia’s two largest countries.87 Gold and silver operated in two registers, the symbolic and the concrete. Just as racial determinism shaped Gobineau’s theory of civilization, it also informed late nineteenth-century debates about currency. The Swiss financier Charles Feer-Herzog was a “gold supremacist.” He voiced the opinion of many at the International Monetary Conference of 1878 when he pronounced silver “an inferior metal, ill adapted to the needs of higher civilizations … only fit as a standard for backward nations.”88 In Britain, thousands of publications from all quarters—academic, financial, legal, agricultural, and manufacturing—revealed the same prejudice in the 1890s. Cernuschi was part of the debate as an international authority on metallic currency standards. However, his engagement was monetary rather than ideological. Oscar Wilde gives us an idea of the magnitude of the debate. In The Importance of Being Earnest of 1899, Miss Prism instructs her pupil Cecily to read political economy. “The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.”89 In An Ideal Husband (1895), Mabel Chiltern recounts how she put off an unwanted suitor. “At lunchtime I saw by the glare of his eye that he was going to propose again, and I just managed to check him by assuring him that I was a bimetallist. Fortunately I don’t know what bimetallism means and I don’t believe anybody else does either.”90 Only a few raised the question of currency to a higher, quasi-moral plane. Opponents of gold supremacism noted that any equation of gold with the West, silver with the East, in other words, the identification of entry to the gold-standard club with the civilized was a regression. If such chauvinism were allowed, according to one British commentator, “we must, perforce, take a somewhat lower view than we have been wont to do of the progress of mankind.”91 Put differently, something greater than money was at stake in the metallic divide. Conventional wisdom has long attributed the making of an early modern global economy to European agency and no small degree of exceptionalism, whereas revisionist economic historians highlight generative forces outside the Western hemisphere.92 In recent studies, the early global market is ascribed a polycentric origin; Asia is recognized as a more active agent than previously accepted. New attention has been given to China, in particular, in shaping the world economy through the latter’s import of silver in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The revisionist argument has China’s development of a silver economy as the precondition, not the product, of an early global economy.93 When the world’s biggest economy at the time gradually adopted the white metal as legal tender, the massive Chinese demand made it more valuable relative to gold. 51

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

European merchants took advantage of the high arbitrage profits to be made in China, buying gold from Japan with silver coins at roughly one third of the global rate in the nineteenth century and selling the latter to China at triple the purchase price. Gold and silver moved throughout the global market in vast quantities, and their exchange was a matter of shared concern. From the eighteenth century onward, Britain’s import of Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk produced a great outflow of silver, a problem that Indian opium was used to rectify. On the important question of the gold to silver ratio, Japan was duly attentive and more interventionist than China. The Shimmi embassy to the United States in 1860 earlier noted travelled with 80,000 Mexican silver coins.94 Shimmi toured the National Mint in Philadelphia where he requested an analysis of the fineness of an American dollar coin and a Japanese gold coin. Such was their concern that delegates returned to the Mint to watch the procedures and make their own measurements, calculations, and drawings of the equipment.95 In the same year, the Tokugawa regime adjusted its gold coins to world rates.96 The Chinese Ambassador to Britain in 1877 also noted the high cost of exchange, but his remarks made no effect on the ruling regime. Kuo Sung-t’ao (Guo Songtao), whose diaries we read in Chapter 1, described the problem for China in some detail: At the Shanghai rate of exchange, 30,000 taels is equal to £8,939 sterling. One English gold piece weighs two mace, two candareens and is called a pound. One pound is equal to twenty small, silver coins called shih-ling, weighing one mace four candareens each and worth two taels eight mace. However, to exchange the English gold piece cost over three taels three mace in standard silver. Hence 20 per cent has been lost in exchange at the expense of the Chinese currency.97

The envoy’s neutral tone belies the grave results: within a generation, Chinese silver tael would lose nearly two-thirds of its value. Any transaction with Western gold standard countries became more expensive. Cernuschi advocated a double standard based on what he called the scientific mechanism of exchange rather than racial or civilizational traits.98 The quantity of precious metals in the world is determined by nature, whereas their values are determined by man. The best way to maintain stability and hence purchasing power, he declared, was the simultaneous minting of gold and silver, whose rate of exchange should be legislated at 15.5 to 1. The structure’s advantage rests on the laws of supply and demand. According to Cernuschi, the abundant metal will be less desired at any one time, and consequently undervalued, the scarce material more desired, and more expensive. But if a rise in production is matched by a rise in demand, a drop in demand would be matched by a dip in production, as is possible when one can freely move from one monetized metal to another.99 If all nations coined gold and silver at the agreed ratio of 15.5 to 1, and if everyone could pay in either currency, the triggers of supply and demand would be reversed: abundance will create demand, rarity will push supply, or so his idea goes. Reduced demand for the scarce, dearer metal would prevent its price from rising; greater demand for the plentiful, cheaper metal, its depreciation. The rate uniformly established in the world would thus be maintained, and the purchasing power of both monetized gold and silver protected from fluctuation.100 Reality disproved theory, however, when the gold to silver ratio varied dramatically in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. 52

Gold, Silver, and Bronze

Asia had historically bimetallic economies. Bronze was not only an artistic or symbolic medium in China, but as coins also a vehicle of payment from the third century BCE onward. Chinese bronze coin was adopted in countries that did not mint their own currency, such as Japan and Korea in the Song period (960–1279 CE). Bronze was thus the legal tender of the trading world of East Asia, and to some extent, also the Indian Ocean.101 Even after the Ming regime accepted silver as the money of account and principal means of tax payment, bronze remained the money of daily life. Other scholars affirm the predominant use of minted copper.102 In effect, an ad hoc and de facto bimetallism was operative during the Ming to Qing periods: silver tael for large-scale, long-distance trade, coins of a lesser metal for petty transactions. Contact and Historiography There is an analogy between fluctuations in monetized gold and silver values and Western judgments of non-Western civilizations via the metals that had become politicized. Cernuschi’s introduction of cast bronze artifacts led to revaluations of China and Japan in Europe from 1873 onward. He put his bimetallist precepts into practice, or his money where his mouth was, when he acknowledged the “bivalence” of Eastern and Western civilizations. Of his collection’s importance Cernuschi had no doubt. In a rare surviving letter he wrote, “I devoted myself to art objects and I have with me an important museum of Japanese and Chinese bronzes. The latter are particularly valuable.”103 They would indeed expose the European public to alterity in both form and function. In a more animated tone, Duret wrote to Manet: “Cernuschi is bringing back from Japan and China a collection of bronze of the like that no one has ever seen anywhere. Some examples will knock you over, that’s all I will tell you!”104 It is important to note that indeed no one in Europe had enjoyed actual contact with such objects before. There was knowledge about early Chinese metallurgy from the late eighteenth century onward, but only in text and image. In 1837, the French Asianist Guillaume Pauthier published La Chine ou Description historique, in which he included translated fragments and illustrations from a Chinese source.105 The original was an official inventory of some 1,444 ancient bronzes in the Chinese imperial collection, commissioned by the Qianlong emperor [Xiqinggujian/Si-thsing-kou-kien]. The Jesuit Amiot sent a lavishly produced edition to a minister to Louis XVI, the sinophile HenriLéonard Bertin, in 1767.106 Pauthier used this catalogue in the Bibliothèque Royale and claimed its reliability to be absolute.107 Duret in turn drew on Pauthier’s work in his confident history of Chinese bronze in Voyage en Asie.108 In 1851, Peter Perring Thoms translated an eleventh-century imperial catalogue of more than 800 bronzes [Bogutulu/ Po-kou-tou, ca.1092 CE]. Thoms used the English title of A Dissertation on the Ancient Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743 to 1496 BC.109 He cited another source, the Tsi-kou-tchai, produced by Youan Youan, governor of Canton and skilled antiquarian.110 Cernuschi was aware of these publications as he arrayed his volumes of Bogutulu and Xiqinggujian with his bronzes at the Palais de l’Industrie.111 53

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2.5  Display of Chinese bronzes, Musée Cernuschi

Book learning, of course, was nothing like an encounter with real specimens. By design Cernuschi showed his collection at the very moment when the group most qualified to study it met in Paris. However, the learned members of the Congrès international des orientalistes gave little attention to the event. In line with contemporary Asian studies, they privileged language, literature, and mythology. Ideas and things occupied separate realms of knowledge. We find a vivid example in a text on ancient mirrors and gold coins. The author François Sarazin, graduate of the École spéciale des langues orientales in Paris, who later helped Guimet in Japan, referred to a book rather than any item in Cernuschi’s collection.112 The episteme of the nineteenth century performed its silent programming function: no one looked to the ritual vessels on display to advance their study of early religion in China. There was nary a mention of Cernuschi’s bronzes in the Journal Asiatique of the Société Asiatique, much inclined towards philological and textual analyses, nor in the subsequent volumes of the Congrès international des orientalistes.113 Their British counterpart, the Royal Asiatic Society, appeared equally indifferent.114 Although readers of translations by Pauthier and Thoms would have known the idea of Chinese proficiency as early as 1500 BCE in casting bronze, they could not cope with the tangible materials on display [Fig. 2.5]. Only one delegate of the Congrès in 1873 mentioned Cernuschi’s landmark exhibition.115 It was Adrien de Longpérier, curator of antiquities at the Louvre, in charge of the Assyrian monuments of Khorsabad excavated by Paul-Emile Botta in 1843 and Victor Place in 1851.116 Noting that there was no comparable bronze metallurgy in the Near East of the same vintage, the curator saw the epistemological value of the East Asian artifacts. He urged the application of scholarly norms to these 54

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foreign objects, a demand for Western methods of analysis for Eastern art that implied a commensurability between two distinct art historical traditions.117 Longpérier thus proposed a shift in the existing calculus. For Gobineau, it was the ancient Near East and not China that produced monuments and artifacts far exceeding Europe. Cernuschi’s bronzes now opened through Longpérier a space for review. Art critics and collectors rather than specialists were the first to respond to the opportunity. The writer Albert Jacquemart (1808–1875), author of a world history of porcelain, declared that Asian metalwork opened “the era of monographs” on the history of Asian art.118 Indeed, a decade after Cernuschi’s exhibition, a book titled L’Art chinois (1887) by Maurice Paléologue drew on the collector’s objects for examples and illustrations; so, too, Louis Gonse’s L’Art japonais.119 The latter could not escape the typical nineteenth-century view. For Gonse, Chinese art was like Chinese civilization— decadent, hence moribund. Japan, overtaking its older sibling, created elegant, charming works that matched its generally dynamic, modernizing approach. Japan had no antiquity to speak of, it was believed, but its aesthetics had greater resonance for the French. According to Gonse, the metalwork from Japan in Cernuschi’s collection exceeded “by their suppleness, elegance and simplicity of form .…” the Chinese examples by far.120 Helping this view were the Meguro Buddha’s magnitude and key position on display. It was Jacquemart who used the material for a revisionist view.121 Like the curator Longpérier, he saw the value of having access to real objects for knowledge production. The bronzes on display “made tangible,” he wrote, the information already known in Europe through the two Chinese imperial catalogues, placed with the actual items brought back by Cernuschi at the Palais de l’Industrie.122 Together, they left little doubt of the early age and history of Chinese metallurgy.123 Jacquemart attempted what we might call an amateur historiography of Asian art in long articles in the Gazette des beauxarts; thus he showed the extent to which specialized knowledge about early Chinese history was available to an informed but non-specialist public. He quoted an additional Chinese source on Zhou dynasty rituals. In this educational mode, the author treated the Chinese objects in terms of facture, inscription, and ancient origin.124 Some works were discussed in such detail as to include the tools used for their realization. Jacquemart thus not only extolled Chinese aesthetic form, but also explained methods of production long refined in antiquity. Contemporary viewers knew, of course, that Europe had its own long tradition of bronze sculptures and monuments, but no direct comparisons were offered between Western metallurgy and the Asian works on display.125 About some examples Jacquemart could do little more than recite their formal qualities and reproduce the translation of the inscription. Such was the case for the double-handled bronze kouei/gui, distinguished by a very wide platter on a low base with two raised, etched handles bearing masks126 [Fig. 2.6]. Similarly, he had little to say about the most alien Chinese items—the ritual drinking cups termed tsiue (also dui or “Tsio” in the nineteenth-century text).127 The chalice on three legs, with a dramatically projecting lip and two short upper posts, significantly differed from items more familiar to contemporary Europeans [Fig. 2.7]. We could think, for example, of symmetrical Greek amphorae or ancient Near Eastern creations. In this, as in other reviews, no sustained engagement with any particular specimen in Cernuschi’s collection can be found. 55

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

2.6  Bronze vessel, kouei (also written as gui), Musée Cernuschi, MC 2303

Jacquemart’s approach, on the whole, was to use Cernuschi’s objects to disprove common prejudice. Contra the usual idea that Chinese art was only the repetition of a theme over time, he used the term of constancy: lasting form reflected a lasting culture.128 He urged viewers to appreciate Cernuschi’s objects as art in order to see the extent to which “widespread ideas on the Chinese lack of imagination and taste are far from the truth.”129 The writer alone appropriated for Chinese work the elegance and beauty said to be uniquely Japanese. For the latter he claimed a likeness to the creation of diverse peoples. Some sake bottles from Japan looked as if they copied Greek funerary vases; others were like Persian carafes.130 Important resemblances were also found between Chinese bronzes, Greek and Etruscan pottery, and works of Renaissance Italy. Jacquemart did not attempt any theory of the diffusion of cultural or symbolic forms across civilizations. But he did offer correctives. Against the orthodox view of Japan as lacking in antiquity, he wrote that Cernuschi gave evidence of bronzes of a “very respectable” age.131 Jacquemart used the exhibition to affirm universality, yet he finally upheld the idea of rank among peoples. All societies had important creations, he wrote, but human progress was tied to “the different degrees of civilization in various peoples.” Thus he maintained, nonetheless, the notion of developmental stages that some achieved more than others and the unrelenting hierarchy of different peoples. 56

2.7  Bronze vessel, tsiue (also written as dui), Musée Cernuschi, MC 649

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Shifting Frames of Interpretation in Europe Recalibrations never take a straight path. Certain prejudices lived on even among informed collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt. “All the ancient art of Japan is a poor, dutiful imitation of Chinese art,” he asserted in 1881. Modern indigenous Japanese bronzes and paintings remained inferior to Chinese creations.132 Gaston Migeon, the curator of Asian art at the Louvre in the early twentieth century, would fault Cernuschi for not correcting prevalent misunderstanding. The latter’s indiscriminate purchases “by the cartload,” in Migeon’s words, without particular intuition or knowledge, deprived the public any idea of the true and ancient bronzes of Japan.133 However, Cernuschi’s objects affected conceptions of art in other ways. For some, they challenged the very distinction of art and craft (“l’industrie”). In Goncourt’s estimation, some objects in Cernuschi’s collection even acceded to “l’art pur.”134 To the extent that we credit the multi-volume Grand dictionnaire universel du dix-neuvième siècle with a definitive or summative role, we find evidence of a new uncertainty. Gobineau earlier put Chinese civilization at the top of ladder for its lasting unity of spirit and governance. “Whatever we think of their civilization, whether we admire or censure the principles upon which it is based,” he wrote, “the results which it has produced, and the direction which it takes; we cannot deny that it pervades all ranks, that every individual takes in it a definite and intelligent part.”135 Most importantly, Gobineau deemed China superior to Rome on account of its unchanging political regime.136 In contrast, Ferrari condemned such despotism, but emphasized China’s intellectual lead over Europe. So, too, did Cattaneo value Chinese philosophy. All three writers acknowledged the quality of China’s art and material culture, but none considered them the country’s greatest achievement. In 1874, the Grand dictionnaire echoed some of these ideas, but also revealed signs of unanticipated rethinking. In the entry on “Orient” the author stated that the role of the East in the development of civilizations across the globe was no longer in doubt: “This civilization successively enlightened Central Asia, Egypt, Greece, Europe, and the whole world.”137 In contrast, modern development belonged to the West, a view that is familiar enough. What is unusual is the wavering assessment of artistic merit. The author was plainly not inclined to Asian aesthetics when he stated that barbaric motifs often ruined the extraordinary porcelains of China and Japan, and the textiles of India, but their harmony of color was unrivaled in the West.138 He further conceded that “the plastic arts of these countries were much less horrible than the awful drawings and hideous baubles that flood our markets and fool ignorant amateurs as examples of Chinese, Hindu or Japanese art.”139 Cernuschi was the agent of such a change of opinion. According to the dictionary, When an enlightened connoisseur such as Henri Cernuschi forms a collection of bronze vases of the Far East, he is not guided by a banal curiosity, but by a feeling for the art that can be realized in these distant lands more easily than is generally assumed. The oriental exhibition of 1873 brought to light Chinese bronzes designed with an irreproachable artistry, and buddhas whose calm, serene, and divine expression undoubtedly were of the highest taste.140

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These comments show that the European public had already assimilated Japanese prints, Asian porcelains, and lacquers, although not yet the strange bronzes. It was precisely Cernuschi’s collection of bronzes that compelled a further and more important concession: “our classical education precludes us from admiring works outside the Greek tradition, and we are unable to consider without a stupefaction mixed with a kind of terror the great temple of Karnak or the Ellora caves.”141 In other words, the author acknowledged a collective inadequacy to judge non-Western peoples and their achievements. The Grand dictionnaire made clear that the quality of early Chinese metallurgy as a function of complex social and symbolic needs compelled further reflection. A set of alien bronze artifacts suddenly made more difficult the award of gold and silver in the contest between entire peoples. The European public naturally ascribed to these objects values divergent from those given by the Chinese themselves. For artists and designers, Cernuschi’s offered new ideas. The noted caster Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810–1892) and Émile Reiber, chief designer for Christofle, makers of luxury goods, imitated a number of Cernuschi’s Japanese articles in short order.142 Such was their manifest usefulness to European decorative arts that Reiber published almost a hundred drawings of Cernuschi’s objects. Most of the items reproduced were Chinese bronzes, disseminated through the Bibliothèque portative des arts du dessin and L’Art pour tous, journals founded by Reiber in the late 1870s to early 1880s.143 Among other material translations were the animal sculptures made by François Pompon (1855–1933), based directly on Cernuschi’s Japanese works.144 Gustave Moreau made drawings of the Asian metalwork and also the photographs of India and Sri Lanka that Cernuschi showed at the Palais de l’Industrie in 1873.145 The collector continued to make his objects available in his residence after the public exhibition. There is evidence that even the most casual passerby could benefit from his generosity. An American art student Kenyon Cox and his colleague happened upon what he described as “some Chinese monsters on the doorstep of one of the ‘swell’ houses of that region [the parc Monceau].” Cernuschi invited the strangers in: “[he] … showed us into a very large room lined with Chinese bronzes, etc., and filled up at the farther end by a great pedestal bearing a squatting bronze figure of Buddha ten feet high. Above this was a carved wooden balcony of dragons and clouds stretching across the end of the room,” wrote Cox in a letter home.146 Cernuschi would continue to facilitate the study of his private collection at home and at international exhibitions abroad.147 Shifting Frames of Interpretation in Asia We have considered changing European reactions to Cernuschi’s materials in the years following his return to Paris. Here, we must attend to the conceptual changes in Japan as they emerged in dialectic rapport with Western ideas. Contact with foreign ideas and methods led to a review of the taxonomy of fine, decorative, applied, and industrial arts. The distinctions that Goncourt began to challenge were also under review in Japan. 59

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We know that “fine art,” bijutsu, arose as a category in the last decades in the nineteenth century in relation to Western ideas, as Ōkuma Toshiyuki and Akiko Mabuchi have recently discussed.148 Cernuschi’s Buddha was deemed a sculpture (chōkoku) in his time, and the small figures and animals he acquired were classified as crafts or decorative arts (kōgei). In 1877, a newly distinct category of manufactured goods (seizō-butsu) appeared at the first National Exhibition for the Promotion of Industry (Naikoku kangyō hakurankai).149 Productions similar to what Cernuschi owned were now presented variously as both fine art (bijutsu) and applied arts (seizō-butsu). In the 1890s, still more complicated and confusing definitions were introduced, including the category of “fine applied arts” or “applied fine arts” (bijutsu kōgyō), as distinct from “industrial arts.” Shifts in classifications were largely an effect of Japan’s experience of Universal Exhibitions, as recent scholars have noted. In 1872, the protection of cultural heritage (Koki kyūbutsu hozon kata) was first legislated, followed by an inventory of national patrimony. In the same year, Japan’s first museum was created.The American Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), a professor of political economy and philosophy at the newly chartered University of Tokyo, was key to the founding of the Tokyo Imperial Museum to which he was appointed director in 1888. As David Carrier has remarked, Fenollosa arrived at the perfect moment when the country wished to rectify its lack of aesthetic theory.150 The perception of the West as tutor to the East is familiar; less known is how Japan put its creations to strategic use. In 1878, the Meiji government created the Kiryū Kōshō Kaisha, or the First Japanese Company for Commerce to do business directly with international firms. This development was significant as Japan’s previous dispatches to the Universal Expositions had been organized by Western agents.151 Clearly the country was taking greater control of its representation abroad when Wakai Kenzaburō and his young assistant Hayashi Tadamasa arrived in Paris to introduce much more significant works than the usual bibelots in the Japanese pavilion at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. Art historians have noted that Japan indeed exploited its success at international exhibitions to redress its broader political subordination in the late nineteenth century.152 Hayashi met important cultural figures such as Goncourt and the journalist Philippe Burty in 1878, relationships that he subsequently maintained. In 1900, now a major dealer in Paris, Hayashi joined the Société Franco-Japonaise, presided by none other than Louis-Emile Bertin (no relation to ancien regime minister Henri Léonard Bertin), the naval engineer who had participated in the construction of a modern Japanese fleet. Officials from Japan recognized the value of the society’s meetings and dinners: French art collectors could help in the economic and diplomatic rapprochement between their countries.153 The parallel commerce of Japanese woodcuts and bric-à-brac would become another vehicle of persuasion. From this vantage, we can see Western art dealers and collectors of such objects as the inadvertent agents of Japanese growth. Here, an instance of a lesser power using its collectable objects to reshape its position in the world. The very sale of particular materials ran alongside, and at times overtook, the abstract conceptualizations of art and history in Japan. Put differently, what foreign travelers like Cernuschi and Duret could buy also indexed local valuations of their own past. In some cases, what was previously crucial became useless, what once had little exchange 60

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value became profitable. Duret described on several occasions the sale of utensils newly rendered obsolete. “An entire arsenal of old armour and antiquated projectiles [was] put on sale and paraded before our eyes” at the old feudal stronghold of Coryama.154 Ritual objects used by Buddhists persecuted by the Meiji regime became commodities in circulation, a development that would govern Guimet’s collection, to be discussed in Chapter 3.155 Merchants also collaborated in such export. When the Paris dealer Philippe Sichel went to Japan in 1882, inspired by Cernuschi’s example, he frequented the country’s two largest purveyors: Minoda Chojiro, who first opened an antique shop in Tokyo in 1855, and moved to Yokohama in 1859; Musshiya, the leading wholesale exporters of arts and crafts.156 Like Duret and Cernuschi in 1871, the French dealer found the wholesale clearance of old things. Sichel boasted that he enjoyed “the best conditions to ransack Japan, to buy what we would find in the open cities and bring out of the heart of the country interesting or curious objects.”157 His trip was a surgical strike that netted him 450 cases containing over 5,000 objects in six months.158 In Osaka vendors appeared at his hotel with wagons of merchandise. Ancient armament and bronze ware from princely households could be had at derisory prices.159 In one afternoon the visitor bought a hundred paintings (kakemono).160 Further evidence comes from the Handbook to Northern and Central Japan in which a great network of vendors, artists, and artisans who catered to international appetites was cited in 1884.161 A later edition explained to its Anglophone readers the variety of collectables at their disposal—among many other items, the now familiar inrō (a medicine box often made of lacquer); the miniature sculpture netsuke; the kōro, or incense-burner; the scroll (makimono) collected by Edmond de Goncourt.162 Conclusion The review of the European reception of Cernuschi’s objects and their fluctuating supply and demand has shown us the equally variable symbolic and material values given by both parties in the transaction. When, in the twentieth century, archaic Chinese bronzes came under scrutiny, Western scholars used various archaeological, scientific, and art historical methods.163 Modern guardians of the Musée Cernuschi duly examined the items in their charge. In the 1970s, the curator Vadime Elisseff identified as Chinese some 300 among the thousands of bronzes acquired by Cernuschi. Only 20, in his estimation, of the 300 were dated to the most prized, early periods of the Shang and Zhou. Elisseff used the criteria of casting, patina, and accuracy of inscription and iconography to demote a good part of Cernuschi’s collection as copies made in the Ming and Qing periods.164 Such is the case for the gui/kouei above [Fig. 2.6] which shows mediocre casting, uncorroded patina, and aberrant iconography according to Elisseff.165 In Cernuschi’s defense, Elisseff ’s successor, the present curator, refutes the charge that the founder bought counterfeits out of ignorance. The collector’s aim was to provide examples from each phase in the long history of Chinese metallurgy, Maucuer argues, which led to a broad range of acquisitions.166 61

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Another sign of further reversals are the doubts cast on the Chinese sources themselves as guarantors of authenticity: in recent decades, scholars have deemed as later imitations between half and three quarters of the four thousand bronzes inventoried in the Xiqingujian.167 Both texts and things are thus the object of continued reassessment; Cernuschi’s collection, like Guimet’s museum, generates ongoing study and debate. The ideological equations in the nineteenth century of metals and civilizations no longer obtain, but the valuation of Cernuschi’s bronze in symbolic and material terms persists. At the structural level, a state of flux marks the entire history of contact between unequal powers. We have been travelling between metaphor and material in the nineteenth century to examine a collector and his collection from a new perspective. In the symbolic realm, equivalences were created in Europe between bullion, civilization, and power; in the global economy, monetized metals were the vehicles of exchange that made real impact on different regions. To a limited degree, as economic historians have shown, coined bronze complicated gold and silver regimes, especially in the early trading worlds of East Asia and the Indian Ocean. The use of monetized metals was itself an archaic, millennial system inadequate to the needs of modern economies. Hence, all metal standards were abandoned by World War II and the association so common at one time of the gold standard with advanced nations and silver with less developed ones had fading relevance. This chapter has singled out cast bronze, the largest part of Cernuschi’s collection, as a vehicle of destabilization. In its artistic form, Asian bronze tested European views on the hierarchy of civilizations and their achievements. Western economic and military superiority was untouched: the arts and crafts of Asia could not upend real force. But chalices of gold, silver, and bronze have always acted in the symbolic rather than material apparatus of power. And so it was in figurative terms that Asian bronze raised the stakes of collecting Asian art in nineteenth-century France. In the bimetallic hierarchy of East and West, this third metal highlighted the unstable ranks of modern France, China, and Japan. Notes 1 I thank Roger Rouse and David O’Brien for their astute commentary on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 See the classic work of Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 3 See Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4 Ibid., 108. 5 Ibid., 141. 6 See the detailed study of Silvia Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi, un humaniste classique et moderne: sa vie, son œuvre et ses collections” (PhD diss., Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne and Università degli Studi di Lecce, 2008), especially 10–40. For a succinct account, see also Elisa Signori, “Enrico Cernuschi entre l’Italie et la France. De la révolution démocratique du Risorgimento à la finance et à l’économie politique,” in Cernuschi, homme politique, financier et collectionneur d’art asiatique, ed. Christophe Marquet (Tokyo: Maison franco-japonaise, 1998), 15–40.

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Gold, Silver, and Bronze 7 Théodore Duret, Histoire de quatre ans. 1870–1873 (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1876–1880), 1:55. Also Giuseppe Leti’s biography, Henri Cernuschi: patriote, financier, philanthrope, apôtre du bimétallisme: sa vie, sa doctrine, ses œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1936). 8 Cernuschi’s activities are recorded in Juliette Lamber, Le Siège de Paris. Le Journal d’une parisienne (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1873), 274, 319–23. 9 Shigemi Inaga, “Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi: journalisme politique, voyage en Asie et collection Japonaise,” in Marquet, Cernuschi, homme politique, 84. 10 Shigemi Inaga, “Théodore Duret (1838–1927). Du journaliste politique à l’historien d’art japonisant” (PhD Diss. Université de Paris VII, 1988), vol. 3, 600–601, cites Duret’s autograph letter to Camille Pissarro in Fondation Custodia, MS Paris 1978-A-8, “J’ai perdu moi-même un de mes intimes amis, M. Chaudey, fusilé à Ste Pélagie par le procureur de la Commune. Je n’ai plus qu’un désir, c’est de quitter, de fuir Paris, pour quelques mois.” 11 On Cernuschi’s collection of Chinese paintings see Éric Lefebvre, Six siècles de peintures chinoises (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2009). 12 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 194–202. 13 Ibid., 230. 14 Ibid., 119. Constantin Cernuschi sold this part of his inheritance. Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 216, cites the Catalogue des tableaux anciens des écoles primitives italienne, allemande et flamande … provenant de la collection Cernuschi, et dont la vente aura lieu à Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, of 1900, in which a part of Cavaleri collection was sold. Michel Maucuer in the exhibition catalogue, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896 Voyageur et Collectionneur (Paris: Paris Musées, Editions des musées de la ville de Paris, 1998), 150, notes a sale in 1897, for which no catalogue has been found. 15 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1871–1875 (Paris: Fasquelle, 1959), 28, “Puis, aussitôt, a commencé la visite des deux mille bronzes, des faïences, des porcelaines, de toute cette innombrable réunion des imaginations de la forme. Dans les bronzes, des merveilles - des merveilles qui semblent l’idéal de ce que le goût et l’art savant de la fabrication peuvent produire.” 16 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 203n806. 17 Louis Gonse, L’Art japonais (Paris: A. Quantin, 1883). 18 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 42. 19 See Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 152–6 for the following. 20 Cernuschi’s will and testament in the Étude de Me Duplan, Notaire à Paris, rue des Pyramides, no.11, now in CARAN, Archives Nationales de France, Minutier Central, Etude LIX, Répertoire XX, liasse 909. “Paris, 23 janvier 1896. Je lègue à la Ville de Paris mon immeuble à Paris, 7 avenue Vélasquez avec tout ce qui s’y trouvent d’objets de provenance asiatique. Ces objets ne devant être exportés de l’immeuble que s’ils sont cédés gratis au Musée du Louvre. Si cette cession a lieu, la Ville de Paris pourra vendre l’immeuble que je lui lègue mais à condition de verser cinquante mille francs au Musée du Louvre à titre d’indemnité pour les frais d’installation des objets asiatiques qu’il recevra de la Ville .…” 21 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 142–51, 181. Davoli cites Joseph (Giuseppe) Ferrari, La Chine et l’Europe: leur histoire et leur traditions comparées (Paris: Didier, 1867). On Cattaneo, see Signori, “Enrico Cernuschi,” 19. 22 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 146, cites evidence that Cernuschi read Cattaneo’s book. 23 Ferrari, La Chine et l’Europe, 161. 24 Clara Lovett, Giuseppe Ferrari and the Italian Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 101.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 25 Quoted in Sims, French Policy, 102. 26 Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 54. 27 Georges Buffon, De l’homme, 1749, reprinted in Michèle Duchet, ed., De L’homme (Paris: François Maspero, 1971). See the chapter “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine,” 223–405. 28 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1853–1855). Michael D. Biddis offers a selection of texts in Gobineau. Selected Political Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). See also Michael D. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970). For a specific treatment of Gobineau and China, see Gregory Blue, “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and the Critique of Modernity,” Journal of World History, 10, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 93–139. 29 Biddis, Gobineau. Selected Political Writings, 113. 30 Ibid., 91. 31 Ibid., 163. 32 Blue, “Gobineau on China,” 98n17. 33 Duret, Voyage en Asie, 127–42. Duret initially published his account serially in the newspaper Le Siècle in September and October 1873. For advice on publishing he consulted no less than Émile Zola. See Duret’s letter to Zola, BnF MS n.a.fr.2518, folio 393–4. 34 Ibid., 81–2. 35 Ibid., 119, “On finit par se lasser de la vue de tant de remparts. On se sent surtout envahi de mépris pour cet empire chinois qui, avec ses centaines de million d’habitants, n’a su demander qu’à une accumulation de murs sa protection contre les quelques millions de nomads qui parcourent la Mongolie.” 36 Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 37 Ibid., 7, cites Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1993) 69–70. 38 Duret, Voyage, 3–4. 39 Ibid., 4, “et si j’accepte la moindre invitation à dîner dont l’hospitalité locale est prodigue, il me faut passer l’habit noir et mettre la cravate blanche. Ainsi non-seulement l’Europe s’est rapprochée du Japon, elle s’y est implantée.” 40 Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 7. 41 Duret, Voyage, 37, “Le vieux Japon pittoresque, le Japon japonais s’en va, et, dans vingt-cinq ans, les gens venus d’Europe iront à sa recherche sans le trouver.” 42 Ibid., 67. “Quand on arrive à Shanghaï, ... on se demande si l’on est bien véritablement en Chine et à l’extrêmité de l’Asie; et de fait à Shanghaï on est aussi peu en Chine que possible. ... On ne trouve la Chine au milieu des Européens que sous la forme d’une multitude de gens de service entretenus par eux, compradores, coulies, porteurs, bateliers, domestiques de tout genre et de tout ordre.” 43 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 11. 44 Duret, Voyage, 67, “Le Chinois a peu de besoins, il produit peu et consomme peu; c’est un mauvais client pour l’Européen, qui, lui, produit beaucoup, qui consomme beaucoup et qui a toutes sortes de besoins.” 45 R.M. Martin was Treasurer for the Colonial, Consular, and Diplomatic Service in China, member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council in the 1840s, and author of a two-volume book, China: Political, Commercial and Social, in 1847.

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Gold, Silver, and Bronze 46 R.M. Martin, “Minute on the British Position and Prospects in China,” in Nineteenth-Century China: Five Imperialist Perspectives (Ann Arbor: Centre for Chinese Studies, 1972), 47–8.  47 Duret, Voyage, 20, “Or il faut dire qu’aussitôt débarqués à Yokohama, nous avons commencé à acheter des bibelots .… Nous avons débuté comme tout le monde, sans dessein arrêté, sans parti pris, allant un peu au hasard, cependant nous nous sommes vite sentis attirés vers les bronzes.” 48 The figures differ. Geneviève Lacambre gives 1,500 bronzes collected by Cernuschi in Japan alone, in Lacambre and Weisberg, Le Japonisme, 152. Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 31, cites the figure of 2,500 Japanese and Chinese bronzes in a posthumous inventory of Cernuschi’s collection. 49 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 31. 50 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 175–6. Maucuer, “Une vision du Japon: les collections japonaises d’Henri Cernuschi,” in Marquet, Cernuschi, homme politique, 95, notes that Meazza was a merchant of silkworm eggs. See also Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 41, on Cernuschi as a client of Bing and Sichel. 51 On the widespread European practice of compiling albums of photographs of Indian sites and monuments, see Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ed., Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On the production and rhetoric of such photographs, see James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire. Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Reaktion, London, 1997). 52 Duret, Voyage, 292, “Tous ces dieux hindous sont des êtres disgracieux et difformes, fruit d’une imagination déréglée.” 53 See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters. 54 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 32, cites Cernuschi, “En Chine je vis des bronzes tellement plus beaux que je compris que tous ceux que j’avais achetés jusqu’alors au Japon n’avaient à côté pas beaucoup de valeur.” 55 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 216, cites an undocumented letter from Cernuschi. 56 Ibid., 175n687, and Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 38, both cite Philippe Burty, “La poterie du Japon,” Le Japon artistique 17, no. 2 (1889): 55. Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 32, cites Pierre Despatys, Les Musées de la Ville de Paris (Paris: G. Boudet, 1900), 57. 57 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 23, “Quand à l’idée de faire une collection, qui devint vite un des buts principaux du voyage, il n’est pas certain qu’elle soit venue à Henri Cernuschi et à Théodore Duret avant leur arrivée au Japon.” 58 Duret, Voyage, 20. 59 Duret, Voyage, 18–19. Among the items on offer, Duret listed ancient bronzes, books, prints, the finest chinoiseries and the cheapest bric-à-brac. 60 Ibid., 21, “Tous les jours chez Yaki on nous apporte des bronzes par centaines. Nous faisons un triage, un lot, un prix en bloc, et notre collection grossit à vue d’œil.” 61 Joseph-Alexandre Hübner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871, trans. Mary Herbert (London: Macmillan and Co, 1878), 361. Translated as Promenades autour du monde, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1873). 62 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 41, “La voie continue à la japonaise sous le nom de Nihon bashi doori ornée à droite et à gauche de boutiques bien garnies. Bronzes, livres, faïence, étoffes, jouets, antiquités, les étalages se succèdent tantôt sombres, tantôt brillants, et cette rue interminable ne cesse d’offrir aux chalands les produits les plus variés et les plus attrayants de l’industrie japonaise.” 63 Vadime Elisseff, Bronzes archaïques chinois au Musée Cernuschi (Paris: l’Asiathèque, 1977), unpaginated preface.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 64 Duret, Voyage, 21. 65 Ibid., 22, “On va quérir le propriétaire du lieu; il consent à vendre le Bouddha, marché est fait; un marteau et des pinces sont apportés séance tenante, et la main droite que le Bouddha étend en avant, d’un geste accentué, est détachée du bras auquel elle est rivée et emportée par nous. C’est déjà quelque chose que d’avoir la main. Il est tard, nous rentrons à Yedo.” 66 See Bernard Frank, L’Intérêt pour les religions japonaises dans la France du XIXe siècle et les collections d’Emile Guimet (Paris: PUF, 1986), 42–5, for more on the Buddha of Meguro. 67 Inaga, “Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi,” 86. The daily records of the Zōzōji monastery are published by Inaga on 95. 68 Duret, Voyage, 23. Inaga, “Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi,” 8, notes that Maron et Cie, a firm in Yokohama, handled the transport of the buddha. 69 Duret, Voyage, 23, “L’acquisition du Bouddha de Megouro complète magnifiquement notre collection de Bouddhas, car nous en avons déjà plusieurs.” 70 Ibid., 122. 71 Ibid., 91, 121. 72 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 60–61, on the article MC 83. See the most comprehensive study of Cernuschi’s bronze collection by Elisseff, Bronzes archaïques chinois, 96–9. True to form, Duret discoursed with remarkable confidence on the history of Chinese metallurgy, regardless of the magnitude of knowledge that he lacked. See Duret, Voyage, 124. 73 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 66–7 on MC 685. 74 William F. Mayers and N.B. Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan: A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of Those Countries, Together with Peking, Yedo, Hongkong and Macao. Forming a Guide Book and Vade Mecum for Travellers, Merchants, and Residents in General (London: Trübner and Co., 1867), 504. 75 Nick Pearce, Photographs of Peking, China 1861–1908 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 47–8, quotes Robert Fortune, Yedo and Peking: A Narrative of a Journey to the Capitals of Japan and China (London: John Murray, 1863). 76 Pearce, Photographs of Peking, 47–9. Susan Naquin, Peking. Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 623–32. 77 Pearce, Photographs of Peking, 47, quotes David F. Rennie, Peking and the Pekingese, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1865) vol. 1, 291–2, 300–301. 78 Stanley K. Abe, “Collecting Chinese Sculpture. Paris, New York, Boston,” in Chong and Murai, Journeys East, 433–42. 79 Ibid., 434. 80 I draw on Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), especially 91–140, for the following. 81 Ibid., 128, states that silver circulated by weight in China and could be freely cut and manipulated to produce the required weight for exchange. 82 Signori, “Enrico Cernuschi,” 31. 83 Edward Atkinson, A Paper on Banking in Its Relation to Note Issues (New York: Reform Club Sound Currency Committee, 1895), 11. Also Senate Committee on Finance, Coinage Laws of the United States 1792 to 1894, 53rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1894, S. Rep. 235 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894). The Bimetallist, 2, no. 1, January 15, 1896 (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1896), 118.

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Gold, Silver, and Bronze Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 116, notes that Cernuschi participated in the Congrès de l’Association pour le progrès de la science sociale, in Liverpool, in 1876; as the French delegate at the International Monetary Conference in 1881; in Spain, 1881; Algeria, 1882; the British House of Commons, 1889; Portugal and Russia, 1891; Argentina and Brazil, 1892; the US Senate, Washington, 1876–1877; Sweden and Norway, 1880. 84 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 23, has also remarked, “Que ce voyage ait été pour Cernuschi l’occasion d’étudier l’économie et les systèmes financiers des pays traversés, même de manière succincte, n’est guère douteux.” 85 Roy W. Jastram, The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560–2007 (1977), updated by Jill Leyland (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2009), 51–2. 86 Ted Wilson, Battles for the Standard: Bimetallism and the Spread of the Gold Standard in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 147–8. 87 See Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 299–301 on the devastating effect of British policy on China and India. Britain used silver to buy massive amounts of Chinese tea, porcelain and silk from the eighteenth century onward. India would be drafted to rectify this trade imbalance through opium. Britain also turned India into a captive market for its export and the inflow of “home charges” to London to pay for British pensions, wars costs, public debts, and government offices. Through these means, India and China effectively allowed Britain to sustain its trade deficits with the United States and countries in Europe in the nineteenth century. 88 Wilson, Battles for the Standard, 148, cites Charles Feer-Herzog. 89 Ibid., 65, cites Oscar Wilde. 90 Ibid., 156, cites Oscar Wilde. 91 Ibid., 148–9, cites Francis Walker. 92 A representative group includes James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guildford Press, 1993); Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: The Silver Age in Asia and the World Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giraldez, Richard von Glahn, eds., Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800 (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and W. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 93 Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 257. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 273, writes that if it were not for China’s capacity to absorb vast quantities of New World silver, the South American mines might have quickly become unprofitable and the accumulation of wealth in the West taken a different trajectory. 94 Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, 29. 95 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 65. 96 Gordon, Modern History of Japan, 51. 97 Frodsham, First Chinese Embassy, 80. 98 Henri Cernuschi, Mécanique de l’échange (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1865). 99 Henri Cernuschi, La Monnaie bimétallique (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1876).

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 100 Wilson, Battles for the Standard, 127–30, notes the role of bimetallic France in stabilizing the world’s currencies against dramatic shocks. When the surge of gold from California and Australia in the early 1850s was feared to send its price into a free fall, France bought gold on a falling market and sold silver on a rising one. Bimetallic France indeed exerted a steadying influence on the system. 101 Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, 248. See also Matao Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Shikano, “The Emergence of the Tokugawa Monetary System in East Asia,” in Flynn et al., Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800, 169–86. 102 Clunas, Superfluous Things, 128, cites the earlier publications by Lien-sheng Yang, Money and Credit in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952) and Peng Xinwei, Zhongguo huobi shi (Shanghai: 1958). 103 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 176, cites Cernuschi’s letter to Tullio Martello, 11 May 1873, in the Archivio storico del Museo del Risorgimento di Milano, Fond Cernuschi, box 1. 104 Inaga cites Duret’s letter to Manet, written from the ship Pékin on October 5, 1872, “Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi,” 89, “Cernuschi rapporte du Japon et de la Chine une collection de bronze telle qu’on n’aura jamais rien vu de pareille nulle part. Il y a là des pièces qui vous renverseront, je ne vous dis que ça!” 105 Guillaume Pauthier, La Chine ou Description historique, géographie et littérature de ce vaste empire, d’après des documents chinois (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1837). The Xiqingguhian or Si-thsing-kou-kien was translated as Mémoires des antiquités de la pureté occidentale. 106 The Xiqinggujian is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits orientaux, chinois 1138–43. Bertin’s copy likely entered the Bibliothèque Royale in 1797. See Nathalie Monnet, Chine. L’Empire du trait. Calligraphies et dessins du Ve au XIXe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004), 155. My thanks to Dr. Monnet, Conservateur en chef, spécialiste des fonds chinois for her private communications. 107 Pauthier, La Chine, 201. 108 Duret, Voyage, 124. 109 Peter Perring Thoms, A Dissertation on the Ancient Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743 to 1496 BC (London: published by author, 1851). The full title is Chong xiu Xuan he bo gu tu lu, now translated as Drawings and Lists of all the Antiquities stored in the Xuan he Palace, in the unabbreviated form. 110 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1, 71. Clunas, Superfluous Things, 94, notes the earliest extant work on archaic bronzes as the Kao gu tu, Research on Archaeology Illustrated of 1092 CE, which included 211 vessels from the palace collections and some 30 private collections. Ouyang Xiu’s Ji gu lu, Records on Collecting Antiquities, produced in the eleventh century, contained 400 rubbings of inscriptions on bronze and stone objects. Zhao Mingcheng and Li Qingzhao, Jin shi lu, Collection of Texts on Metal and Stone, 1119–1125 CE, included 2,000 rubbings of inscriptions and added explanations. 111 Noted by Albert Jacquemart, “Les Bronzes chinois au palais de l’Industrie,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (Oct. 1873): 283. Also Elisseff, Bronzes archaïques chinois, xi; Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 42; and Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 186. 112 François Sarazin, “Sur les anciens miroirs des Japonais,” Congrès international des orientalistes. Compterendu de la première session, Paris 1873 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1874), 81, “Parmi les plus beaux ouvrages japonais qui ornent les vitrines de l’Exposition artistique du Congrès des Orientalistes, au Palais des Champs-Élysées, se trouve un grand recueil intitulé Syu-ko-zyu-syu, dans lequel on a réuni les dessins d’une quantité d’antiquités japonaises; vases et bronzes, inscriptions, autographes, armures, instruments de musique, etc.”

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Gold, Silver, and Bronze 113 The renowned Orientalist Ernest Renan was a stalwart contributor to the Journal Asiatique, ou recueil de Mémoires, d’Extraits et de Notices relatifs à l’Histoire, à la Philosophie, aux Sciences, à la Littérature et aux Langues des Peuples Orientaux, which first appeared in 1822 and continues to this day. No less than Emperor Mutsuhito of Japan was among the members of the Congrès des Orientalistes in 1874. Cernuschi’s name appeared from 1873 onward, but his bronzes did not figure in the Journal Asiatique after that year. 114 No article treated Asian metallurgy or objects of worship or ritual use in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, second series (London: Trübner and Co., 1865–1889). 115 The Congrès in 1873 was organized by Léon de Rosny, a pioneer in France of Japanese studies and pupil of the sinologist Julien Stanislas. Adrien de Longpérier, “Observations sur quelques objets de l’antiquité japonaise et chinoise,” Congrès international des orientalistes (1874), 98. 116 On the reception of Mesopotamia in Europe, see Frederick Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 117 As curator, Henri Adrien Provost de Longpérier received the momentous delivery to the Louvre of Assyrian works from Khorsabad. He was the author of Notice des monuments exposés dans la galerie d’antiquités assyriennes au musée du Louvre (Paris: Vinchon, 1849), among other publications on Near Eastern antiquities and both Eastern and European numismatics. 118 Jacquemart, “Les Bronzes chinois,” 281–2. 119 Maurice Paléologue, L’Art chinois (Paris: Quantin, 1887). 120 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 36, cites Louis Gonse, “Exposition orientale des ChampsÉlysées,” in Le Moniteur universel, November 4, 1873. 121 Jacquemart, “Les Bronzes chinois,” 286–7. Jacquemart and Edmond Le Blant were the authors of Histoire artistique, industrielle et commerciale de la porcelaine (Paris: J. Techener, 1862). An English translation appeared as History of the ceramic art. A descriptive and philosophical study of the pottery of all ages and all nations, trans. Bury Palliser (London: S. Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873). 122 Jacquemart, “Les Bronzes chinois,” 283, “Ces livres précieux, nous les voyons ouverts dans les vitrines du palais de l’Industrie, et leurs énonciations deviennent tangibles, grâce à l’immense collection réunie autour d’eux.” 123 Ibid., 282–3. 124 Ibid., 281–303. 125 For the latest study of bronze metallurgy in the European tradition, see the collective volume by Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and Guilhem Scherf, eds., Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution (Paris: Somogy Art Publisher, 2009). At the time of writing, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and others are organizing a conference to be held at the Louvre and the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France called “French Bronzes: History, materials and techniques of bronze sculpture in France (16th–19th centuries).” The call for papers thus indicates the approaches to be taken. 126 Jacquemart, “Les Bronzes chinois,” 286–7. 127 Ibid., 293. 128 Ibid., 296–9. 129 Ibid., 293. 130 Ibid., 458–9.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 131 Ibid., 446–69. 132 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:337–45. 133 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 184, cites Gaston Migeon, Au Japon. Promenades aux sanctuaires de l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1908). 134 Geneviève Lacambre, “La Diffusion de l’art d’Extrême-Orient,” in Marquet, Cernuschi, homme politique, 131, cites Edmond de Goncourt’s journal entry of July 1, 1875. 135 Arthur de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with particular reference to their respective influence in the civil and political history of mankind, trans. H. Hotz and J.C. Nott (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1856), 285. 136 Ibid., 290–91. 137 Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1866–1890), 1874, vol. 11, 1463, “Il n’est plus permis aujourd’hui de placer ailleurs que sur les bords de l’océan Indien les premiers progrès de cette civilisation qui a successivement éclairé l’Asie centrale, l’Egypte, la Grèce, l’Europe et l’univers entier.” 138 Ibid., “Les porcelaines de la Chine et du Japon, les étoffes de l’Inde, souvent déparées par des dessins barbares, offrent des combinaisons de teintes d’une harmonie tout à fait remarquable et d’un éclat qu’il ne nous est pas donné d’égaler.” 139 Ibid., “L’expression, dans les arts plastiques de ces pays, n’est pas aussi nulle, à beaucoup près, que pourraient le faire croire les ignobles dessins ou les hideux magots dont le commerce inonde nos marchés et que de faux amateurs acceptent comme types de l’art chinois, hindu ou japonais.” 140 Ibid., “Quand un amateur éclairé, comme M. Henri Cernuschi, forme une collection de vases ou de bronzes de l’extrême Orient, il n’est pas guidé par une banale curiosité, mais par un sentiment de l’art qui trouve, plus aisément qu’on ne le suppose généralement, à se satisfaire en ces pays lointains. L’exposition orientale de 1873 a mis au grand jour des bronzes chinois ciselés avec un art irréprochable et des buddhas dont l’expression calme et sereine, divine appartenait certainement au plus haut style.” 141 Ibid., “Notre éducation classique a beau nous interdire les admirations étrangères à l’art grec, nous ne saurions contempler, sans une stupéfaction mêlée d’un sorte de terreur, le grand temple de Karnac ou les grottes d’Ellora.” 142 For photographs of the commercial translation of Cernuschi’s collected objects, see Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 100; and Lacambre and Weisberg, Le Japonisme, 31, figs. 22, 23. See Lacambre and Weisberg, Le Japonisme, 313 on Christofle et Cie. 143 Emile Reiber, Bibliothèque portative des arts du dessin (Paris: A. Morel et Cie, 1877). Emile Reiber, Claude Sauvageot, Pierre Gélis-Didot and Henry Guédy, L’Art pour tous. Encyclopédie de l’art industriel et decorative (Paris: A. Morel et Cie, 1861–1906), especially 1877 to 1883. 144 Lacambre, “La Diffusion de l’art d’Extrême-Orient,” 132. 145 Ibid., 124. Gustave Moreau made his drawings at precisely 7:30 am on November 5, 1873. 146 H. Wayne Morgan, ed., An American Art Student in Paris: The Letters of Kenyon Cox 1877–1882 (Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 1986), 72–3. 147 Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 208, notes that in addition to the above, Cernuschi sent objects to the Universal Exhibition in Vienna in 1873. Lacambre, “La Diffusion de l’art d’Extrême-Orient,” 128, notes that Cernuschi participated in the 1880 retrospective exhibition of metalwork. See Germain Bapst, Le Musée retrospective du métal à l’exposition de l’Union central des beaux-arts. Extrait de la Revue des arts décoratifs (Paris: A. Quantin, 1881), 4.

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Gold, Silver, and Bronze 148 For the following discussion, I rely on Akiko Mabuchi, “Cernuschi et sa collection d’okimono,” in Marquet, Cernuschi, homme politique, 106–21, especially 108–9. 149 See Marquet, Cernuschi, homme politique, 66. 150 Fenollosa made an impact on both sides of the Pacific through his writings on Japanese and Chinese art, and his work as curator of Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was advisor to the collectors Isabella Gardner Stewart and Charles Freer of the Freer Museum in Washington, DC. His key publications include An Outline of the History of Ukiyo-ye, published in Tokyo, 1901; Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (London: William Heinemann, 1912). Also see Carrier, Museum Skepticism, 126–45. 151 Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, 114, notes that 400 cases of tea, sugar, porcelain, lacquer ware, textiles, and other products had been sent from Japan for the Universal Exhibition of 1867. Jeehyun Lee, “Le langage universel des beaux-arts: la promotion de l’art japonais par Edmond de Goncourt et Hayashi Tadama,” Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt 18 (2011): 69. 152 Ellen P. Conant, “Japan ‘Abroad’ at the Chicago Exposition, 1893,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. Ellen P. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 254–80. See also Conant, “Refractions of the Rising Sun, Japan’s Participation in International Expositions 1862–1910,” in Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850–1930, eds. Tomoko Sato and Toshio Watanabe (London: Barbican Gallery, 1991), 79–92. Also Lee, “Le langage universel des beaux-arts,” 69–82. 153 See the memoirs of Raymond Koechlin, Souvenirs, 59–60. 154 Duret, Voyage, 61, “En traversant Coryama, nous trouvons toutes les boutiques remplies des canons, fusils, sabres et cuirasses dont étaient autrefois armés ses soldats. Tout un arsenal de vieilles armures et d’antiques engins, offert et mis en vente, nous passe ainsi sous les yeux.” 155 See James Edward Ketelaar’s excellent study, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 156 Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 100. 157 Philippe Sichel, Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon (Paris: E. Dentu, 1883), 2–3, “De son côté, mon frère connaissait à fond Tokio, la grande capitale, nous étions donc dans les meilleures conditions pour, à nous trois, dévaliser le Japon, acheter ce que nous trouverions dans les villes ouvertes et faire sortir de l’intérieur du pays les objets intéressants et curieux.” The book is translated in English by Max Put, Plunder and Pleasure. Japanese Art in the West 1860–1930 (Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000). 158 Sichel, Notes d’un bibeloteur, 83. 159 Ibid., 27–9. 160 Ibid., 34. 161 Ernest Mason Satow and A.G.W. Hawes, A Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan (London: John Murray, 1884), 92–119. 162 Basil Hall Chamberlain and W.B. Mason, A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (London: John Murray, 1891), 13. 163 Xueqin Li and Sarah Allan, Chinese Bronzes: A Selection from European Collections (Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing House, 1995). See Li, “The Discovery of and Research on Chinese Bronzes: a Brief History,” in ibid., 405–8, and Allan, in “Chinese bronzes in the eyes of Western scholars,” in ibid., 409–18, written in Chinese.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 164 See Elisseff, Bronzes archaïques chinois, for treatments of 39 works in the Musée Cernuschi. See also Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896; Gilles Béguin, Michel Maucuer, and Hélène Chollet, Arts de l’Asie au Musée Cernuschi (Paris: Paris musées, Editions Findakly, 2000). 165 Eliseff, Bronzes archaïques chinois, 44. 166 Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 38. 167 Monnet, Chine. L’Empire du trait, 155.

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3 The Labor of Travel: Guimet and Régamey in Asia

The venerable Musée Guimet was inaugurated at the Place de l’Alma in Paris on November 23, 1889. The original institution was a museum of world religions founded by Émile Guimet (1836–1918), who donated the many objects he acquired on his only journey to East Asia in 1876. In the twentieth century, the museum acceded to the position of Musée national des arts asiatiques of France. Literature on the institution has presented his travels for the most part as an anecdotal, if appealing, story of origin. The result is the systematic neglect of the somatic experiences and foreign labors that were constitutive of the museum of valuable objects. I offer an alternative approach. At the core of this chapter is an analysis of Guimet’s travel account, Promenades japonaises of 1878 and Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko of 1880, illustrated by Félix Régamey (1844–1907), the French artist who accompanied him through East Asia.1 He, among many visitors-turned-authors, attempted a coherent and comprehensive account of Japan, including chapters on its religions, mythologies, and cultural practices.2 To examine the untidy process of mobility that created his collection, I single out below the treatment of how Guimet traveled to his various destinations. I draw on recent developments in cultural geography and anthropology that emphasize mobility as gendered, racialized, and classed to look at the social relations of travel as seen in representations by Guimet and Régamey. I further analyze cultural productions by both Western visitors and Japanese artists—Isabella Bird and JosephAlexander Hübner, Utagawa Hiroshige II, Utagawa Hiroshige III, and Kawanabe Kyōsai. Each instance highlights the ways in which mobility impinged on the relations between East and West. While travel was an assimilation of foreign territories, it was also a disorientation for those who left the safe ground of home. In this regard, although the technologies of transport have long been taken to signify modernity, they proved unreliable as its universal index. Mechanized transports were not absent from Meiji Japan, while archaic animal and human traction were still found in contemporary France. Thus, transport was an indicator of flux between regions of the world; transport itself was in flux in different regions.

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Consistent with our identification of modernity and mechanization, each of the above Europeans would focus on the pre-modern, labor-intensive conveyances in Meiji Japan. They gave particular attention to the jinrikisha, the two-wheeled rickshaw invented in the early 1870s to move people through city streets. In the countryside they resorted to the older palanquin, a covered seat carried by poles on the shoulders of two men, known as the cango (also written as kago). The founder of the Musée Guimet relied on such modes to pursue information on native religions and their accessories in Japan. He and Régamey made two excursions, one of some 230 miles (471 km) along the well-traveled Tōkaidō Road between Tokyo and Kyoto, and a shorter circuit of 74 miles (119 km) from Tokyo to Nikko.3 It was on these journeys to important sites and temples that Guimet completed his religious survey and acquisitions. Thus he and Régamey traversed the country not on their own two feet, but largely via the footsteps of Japanese porters. The latter would both facilitate and disrupt the French project. Japan’s national history as briefly discussed in Chapter 1 rules out any identification of subalternity, yet at the individual level the laborers who conveyed foreigners from one place to another assumed exactly that role. Gayatri Spivak’s interrogation of whether the subaltern can speak to power and the extent to which they are ventriloquized by those who claim to represent them transparently remains apposite.4 But inasmuch as Guimet and Régamey were ventriloquists, they were not wholly successful: as we will see, the self-reflexive passages on travel in their travel account form a mise-en-abyme, an image within an image that reveals the artifice of the whole. In so doing, they created a space for the objects of their scrutiny in which to emerge as subjects. Spivak’s figure of the inaccessible subaltern will thus be tested by Promenades japonaises, whose depictions of travel show an ambiguous agency. The native laborers disturbed Western codes of representation. Their position of enunciation is neither identical to nor commensurate with Western authorship, but they effectively reconfigured the familiar iconography of East and West, masculine and feminine, active and passive. The deconstructive reading strategies employed by postcolonial theorists draw attention to ambiguities of power and identity in colonial texts. In the visual field, some look at the ways in which representations by imperial and colonial delegates belie their ostensible authority. Among the most recent is the art historian Elisabeth Fraser, who convincingly argues that Eugène Delacroix’s travel sketches of North Africa in 1832 reveal “the ambiguities and insecurities of the European traveler in a place where he has little control.”5 Instead of the canonical Algerian Women in their Apartments of 1834 in the Louvre, among Delacroix’s other confident images of “Arabs” engaged in typical native rituals and activities, Fraser examines the travel sketches, now known as Albums of North Africa and Spain. In these sketches she finds the artist making a “disconnected, fragmented description” that fell short of the Napoleonic bravado, what Edward Said called the “Orientalist engulfment,” manifest in the earlier project, La Description de l’Egypte. Delacroix could not manage what Fraser terms “Orientalist certainty” in Algeria and Morocco.6 In a parallel manner my focus is on the ways in which the corporeal experiences of travel by Europeans in East Asia some decades later pressured the familiar hierarchy and gendering of East and West found in Orientalist imagery. One did not emerge 74

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unscathed when crossing borders. The discomfort of movement, the material practices of travel abroad (and at home) would reverse the classic image of the upright, manly Occidental and his supine, effeminate opposite. To cut to the chase, in the narratives to be examined below, the reclining odalisque turned out not to be Japanese. Modern travel has been examined in several fields in recent decades. From the perspective of cultural studies, Marian Aguiar argues that “colonial modernity was born out of travel .… Colonial rhetoric justified its role in terms of travel, fetishizing a history of exploration, migration, and mobile technologies.”7 The sociologist Dean MacCannell considers travel’s corollary, tourism, as a postindustrial social structure enjoyed by an international middle class.8 The feminist critic Caren Kaplan views a voluntary dislocation as a site of postmodern identities.9 More specifically within Europe, Ginette Verstraete defines cultural tourism as “a mass-produced politics of location” that promotes certain models of European citizenship.10 Exploration in terra incognita is also a key part of modern ideals of virility.11 Thus, scholars variously acknowledge that gender is central to the relationship between power and movement, the polarizations of gender roles abroad and at home impinging on cross-cultural contact and its representations.12 Cultural geographers further stress the ways in which mobility is practiced differently by women and men.13 So, too, anthropologists such as James Clifford, who remarked that masculinist norms of travel have gendered “the discursive/imaginary topographies of Western travel.”14 He goes on to note that travel as the condition of possibility for fieldwork, the defining procedure of anthropology, is often purged from academic exegesis. Both conceptual and methodological problems occur when the discourse of ethnography, in Clifford’s words, “being there,” is separated from the discourse of travel, the “getting there.”15 Collecting and museum studies have made the same elision. What is displayed in the collection and museum is detached from the process by which it was acquired. A counteractive approach, then, is to examine the messy components, the dialogic and social relations involved in forming a collection en route rather than the museum as an entity at home. What we need to do, in other words, is to bring back into view the politics of travel, the “getting there,” at the core of the Musée Guimet. And the right to be there at all, of course, was the very source of conflict between European and Asian powers for centuries. Guimet’s voyage to East Asia in 1876 is often characterized as an official expedition, but he emphasized his private initiative: it was only on the advice of friends that he requested a diplomatic passport to complete an entirely self-funded survey of Eastern religions under the auspices of the French Ministère de l’Instruction publique.16 Thus designated as an official “mission scientifique,” the visitor arranged important contacts that proved invaluable in Japan. Like Engelbert Kæmpfer, Philip Franz von Siebold, and others before him, Guimet used his voyage as the fulcrum for knowledge production. The results were unveiled in 1878 at the Universal Exposition in Paris, the occasion for France to show its recovery from the disasters of the war of 1870 and the Paris Commune. Guimet’s interest in world religions and his contribution to public comprehension cannot be isolated from the broader history of French expansion overseas, nor from contemporary attitudes toward collecting and knowledge production. His activities 75

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must further be situated in personal motivations. A notion of bourgeois philanthropy in the modern nation-state similar to Cernuschi’s principles and fundamentally different from Goncourt’s conception of art collecting, identity, and civic responsibility shaped Guimet’s practices. Herbert Marcuse’s essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” helps us understand the larger class dimensions of his activities.17 “Affirmative culture,” a particular emergence of what Marcuse characterized as “the bourgeois epoch,” widely accepted in the nineteenth century, promoted the idea of “a universally obligatory, eternally better, and more valuable world.” Key to this position is the not entirely disinterested view that a transcendent world could be attained through individual cultivation without change to the often harsh material conditions of survival. According to Marcuse, the progressive, idealist character of affirmative culture would give way to the repression of discontented masses and “self-justifying exaltation” once the bourgeoisie stabilized its position as the new ruling elite. Our protagonist in this chapter, seated on the far left in the photograph, was an exemplary man of the bourgeois era in this sense [Fig. 3.1]. The owner of a lucrative business established near Lyons by his father, Jean-Baptiste Guimet, the distinguished chemist and inventor of synthetic colors, Émile was long interested in archaic religions. In 1865, at the age of 29, he visited Egypt. This trip was a turning point in his career as a collector. Guimet admired the work of Auguste Mariette, a self-taught Egyptologist who, under the aegis of the Ministère de l’Instruction publique, set out in 1850 to acquire Coptic and Syrian manuscripts for France. Mariette’s archaeological searches were so fruitful that the Egyptian viceroy Said Pacha named him director of antiquities; Mariette’s excavations were housed in the newly built Musée de Boulaq in Cairo. Among Guimet’s souvenirs were bronze deities, canopic jars, statuettes, papyri, and even a pair of mummies.18 Guimet’s interest was further guided by the writings of Jean-François Champollion and other French Egyptologists.19 Like Cernuschi, Guimet supplemented the collection made in situ with purchases at home from dealers, collectors, and small European museums.20 His concern expanded to a comparative study between Egypt and the early civilizations of India, Chaldea, and China. In 1879, he created the Musée Guimet in Lyons to display his collection of religious artifacts and writings. The museum of world religion, relocated to Paris a decade later, came under the administration of the “Direction des Musées de France” and turned into “Le Département des arts asiatiques des musées nationaux” in the twentieth century.21 Guimet’s private activity became a national institution as the founder had wished. (The museum’s focus would gradually move away from world religions to histories of Asian arts from Afghanistan to Indonesia.)22 Guimet’s fellow traveler in 1876 was the artist Régamey, standing on the far right in the photograph. He had worked for the Illustrated London News during the French tumult of the early 1870s.23 The former pupil of Lecoq de Boisdaudran also worked for Harper’s Weekly in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Guimet invited Régamey,on the journey through East Asia. On return they collaborated on Promenades japonaises. It was an attempt at a comprehensive study in the tradition of Engelbert Kæmpfer and Philip Franz von Siebold, but in a more personal voice. (In a separate account, Huit jours aux Indes, Guimet described their brief journey from Sri Lanka to southern India.24) 76

3.1  Émile Guimet and Félix Régamey with their interpreters. Guimet is seated on the far left, interpreters Kondō Tokutarō and Utahara Jūzaburō are in the center, the cook with hand on chin stands behind, and Régamey stands on the far right, holding a cane. Photographer unknown, 1876, Yokohama

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Guimet took almost the same itinerary as Duret and Cernuschi in Japan, China, India, and Sri Lanka, where he collected thousands of religious artifacts and works of art for his eponymous museum. He had no training in East Asian languages, but he had greater knowledge of Eastern religions than his countrymen, and a systematic approach to his acquisitions. Bernard Frank, the French scholar of Japan, noted the close match between Guimet’s original collection and the information in the encyclopedic Nippon Archiv für Beschreibung von Japan, of 1831, by the German physician Siebold, who spent six years in the Dutch embassy at Nagasaki in the 1820s. The Musée Guimet has a copy of Siebold’s treatment of religion, the Pantheon von Nippon, which includes the late eighteenth-century Japanese source, Butsuzô zui, an illustrated catalogue of Buddhist imagery of which the Musée Guimet also has a 1798 edition.25 Guimet’s feat of gathering such a complex pantheon in only nine weeks in Japan can be attributed to his knowledge of the documents that bear his annotations. His success also depended on local collaboration, including the lieutenant-governor of Kyoto and the Minister of Education: appeals were made to shrines and monasteries in every part of the country to accommodate his inquiries.26 Little is known about the origin of Guimet’s acquisitions. The occasional document found inside a statue and no more than a handful of inscriptions give a date, or the name of a temple, but no information exists on how most of these objects found their way into the French collector’s hands.27 Guimet, like Duret and Cernuschi before him, benefited from the turmoil in Japan in the 1860s that made available formerly inaccessible materials. Buddhism was under attack from more than one quarter, nativist ideologues rejecting it as an import from China, the Meiji revolutionaries keen to stamp out a cult associated with the Tokugawa rule that they deposed.28 In 1871, the new regime made Shinto shrines the official site of national rites. The Office of the Investigation for the Elimination of Temples (Haiji Torishirabe Kyoku) imposed the laicization of Buddhist monks; a wave of popular attacks destroyed temples, statues, and relics. It was in this moment of state-sponsored iconoclasm that Cernuschi removed the giant Buddha from Meguro. Guimet noted the local conditions that also favored his undertaking. Buddhists priests in fear of persecution shared their principles. Shinto clergy explained their religion. They invited him to attend their rites in full grandeur, and pressed upon him holy books and statues.29 They gave him access to the major temples of Nikko, Tokyo, Ise, and Kyoto, as well as the sanctuaries along the Tōkaidō Road. Guimet was clear about these dramatic changes that helped his project. “Europeans now attend ceremonies forbidden to the Japanese except their priests and great lords; “ he wrote, and “foreigners are welcomed with all the honors whereas their presence in these places a few years before brought the death sentence.”30 According to his own tally, Guimet acquired in Japan over 300 religious paintings, 600 statues, and over a thousand books and manuscripts in nine weeks. What the Frenchman could not remove he copied, as in the Buddhist mandala of 21 large scale religious figures in the ancient Temple of Toji in Kyoto.31 The chief priest granted Guimet’s bold request and even arranged for a facsimile to be made by a renowned sculptor. The ensemble of 23 statues, a reduced version of the original at Toji, with two additional figures, would enjoy pride of place in Guimet’s museum much like Cernuschi’s giant Buddha from Meguro [Fig. 3.2]. 78

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3.2  1876 replica of the mandala from Temple of Toji in Kyoto now in the Musée Guimet

Conditions were more difficult in China, as Duret and Cernuschi had also found. Guimet complained of unsympathetic officials and hostile clergy. Lacking Francophone interpreters, he relied on Catholic and Protestant missionaries for help in obtaining information. He met with resident scholars in China, bureaucrats, and priests in preparation for a return visit. In India the conditions were different again. Guimet described the subcontinent in broad terms, based on visits to Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Parsi, and Jain temples. His part as a bourgeois philanthropist in France illustrates Marcuse’s notion of an affirmative culture that upholds and conceals social relations. The museum, according to Marcuse, was an ideal place to shift attention away from the material conditions of life towards the consolations of a transcendant world.32 Guimet duly created three affiliated institutions in Lyons upon his return—a museum of world religions; a library of Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhalese, Chinese, Japanese, and European materials on the subject; a school for East Asian languages. To this end, he secured “the help of five Buddhist groups in Japan, two Indian Buddhist sects, one Confucian, and several Shinto parties.”33 The founder had in mind a resource for the comparative study of non-Western religions. And he stated a commitment to the physical and spiritual well-being of his factory workers, boldly claiming for himself such predecessors as Lao Tze, Confucius, Sakia, Mouni, Zoroaster, Moses, Plato, Jesus, and Mohammed, who each provided social solutions in their day.34 Travel and Representation I want to turn from the Musée Guimet’s institutional history to the earlier, formative moment when Guimet obtained the materials of his museum. Cultural geographers notably emphasize mobility as an irreducibly embodied experience, one that involves blistered feet or agreeably stretched limbs, the crush of fellow passengers or the exhilarating sensations of speed.35 But mobility is also a socially produced motion overdetermined by relations of power, gender, race, and class. These are the untidy bits 79

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abstracted from representation. The politics of travel are evident yet thus far overlooked in Guimet’s Promenades japonaises, which describes how the author went from one place to another. Just as there were pre-existing networks of supply and demand for collectable objects, there were local structures and significations of transport in Asia. But before turning fully to Guimet’s account, we first need to understand the ways in which modern European women and men attended to the technologies of mobility. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown, transformations in infrastructure were vitally registered in the sensate body.36 Travel by rail intervened on the passenger’s body, determining her perceptions of time and space, at times in distressing ways. New modes of transport were the subject of much attention. Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Gustave Caillebotte are the best known among many artists who made modern infrastructure a central motif.37 Before Monet and company produced their serene images of the railway, Daumier depicted all forms of circulation on land, water and air.38 Un premier voyage en chemin de fer, one of a series on the iron horse in the 1840s, depicted a group of well-off travelers rapt not in marvel but in anxiety.39 Three men and a woman each wore a grim expression, mouths turned down, fingers tightened around canes and parcels as they endured this initiation. No one looked out the window; no one enjoyed the new experiences of movement and vision offered by technology.40 Daumier’s Impressions et compressions de voyage of 1843 showed another traumatic encounter. On the roof of a train, one man was knocked onto his backside, limbs in the air as the locomotive began its march across a landscape denoted only by horizontal lines. Another in coattails leapt, or was thrown, from the covered compartment into open wagons of squashed customers whose outstretched arms, flying hats, and grimaces again indicate anything but comfort.41 In other drawings and paintings, such as the well known views of the first, second, and third class train carriages, Daumier further highlighted issues of gender, class, and social relations.42 Transport, a key part of the history of modern life, held an emblematic function in French culture. Zola opened his novel, La Curée, of 1871, with a great traffic jam. Larry Duffy highlights the way the author identified every character with his or her vehicle (as we do today): Madame de Lauwerens in a perfectly harnessed victoria; Mesdames Guende and Teissière, a coupé; even the infant Sylvia, a blue pram.43 Zola made the railway the major theme of La Bête humaine, complete with long descriptions of the Gare St-Lazare. Monet devoted a well-known series to the station in the mid-1870s.44 These modern artists not only treated what Zola called “the poetry of train stations”; they lived on its very arteries: Manet’s studio and Caillebotte’s apartment were on streets radiating from the Gare St-Lazare, Monet regularly traveled there by train from his home in Argenteuil.45 The less well-known individuals below carried this sensibility abroad. The Austrian diplomat Joseph-Alexander Hübner, the French amateur photographer Hugues Krafft, the Englishwoman Isabella Bird, and the American Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore each produced catalogues of transport and their own sensations abroad. All were struck by the newly invented jinrikisha (also known as kuruma) pulled by a runner in front and pushed, on occasion, by one behind. Armchair travelers could see this conveyance through the photographs of Felice Beato, resident in Japan from 1863 to 1874, and 80

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3.3  Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, “A Kuruma,” 1881

various written accounts.46 Scidmore’s memoir of 1891 had as its very title Jinrikisha Days in Japan.47 However, these visitors had trouble with the switch from motorized to human transport. The difficulty was both deliberately and inadvertently manifest in their travel narratives in the 1870s. Isabella Bird, who traversed China, Japan, Persia, and the United States, was distressed by the reliance on manpower in Japan.48 In her account, a pleasant trip from Yokohama to Tokyo on “an admirable, well-metalled, double track railroad … built by English engineers …” heightened her shock at the “hundreds of kurumas [rickshaws], and covered carts with four wheels drawn by one miserable horse …” awaiting her outside the station.49 She captured the vehicle in word and image50 [Fig. 3.3]. Certainly the novelty of autochthonous forms, whether the jinrikisha or the palanquin (cango/kago,) interested visitors. But it was interactions with native laborers that made the greatest impact. Several demonstrations of their curiosity exist. When Bird regained her composure, she noted her rapport with coolies such as those who “did all they could to help me; lifted me gently from the horse, made steps of their backs for me to mount.”51 Hübner (1811–1892), too, treated circulation in his account. His version of the jinrikisha: “a kind of carriage on two wheels, prettily lacquered, covered with a white hood, and drawn by a man.”52 He provided a visual record of the antiquated cango in an image of himself in the sedan chair resting on the shoulders of two almost naked men53 [Fig. 3.16]. Another one among virtually all Western visitors to Japan to document both the vehicle and its operators was Hugues Krafft (1853–1935), who spent six weeks in Japan in 1882 to 1883. He was connected, through both reading and personal association, to 81

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3.4  Hugues Krafft, “Kago à Hakone,” 1882–1883

the circle of European travelers and collectors under review here. While crossing the Pacific, the young Frenchman reread Hübner’s memoirs.54 He would become acquainted with Régamey, who subsequently visited and wrote about the Japanese house that Krafft built on his family estate in France.55 Their shared interest in Japan and the local transports that allowed them to tour the country is evident in the many photographs that Krafft took of porters, grooms, itinerant peddlers, and other roving figures on the road. For a tour with his brother and two friends, they hired a convoy of 14 rickshaws, of which one was designated to ferry Krafft’s darkroom and photographic equipment. The entire party comprised 34 men. In 1884, he presented some of the 400 photographs he took in Japan to the Société géographique de Paris; the following year he published his Souvenirs de notre tour du monde.56 Like Hübner, Krafft featured the cango. He showed a member of his entourage carried by two runners, accompanied by a kneeling groom, and another European visitor57 [Fig. 3.4]. Krafft went even one better than his predecessors when he acquired one such vehicle, now in the Musée de la voiture at Compiègne. He, too, made public donations of much of his vast collection, some of which were eventually allocated to the Musée Guimet in the early twentieth century.58 Guimet and Régamey, like Krafft, described in Promenades japonaises the every vehicle they used.59 Indeed, their attention to movement itself is the most compelling part of their two-volume travel account. The combination of somatic experience and depiction worked against their goals, however, as the vivid account of travel would 82

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eclipse the larger study of religious precepts, folklore, and social practices. Even more important, sensation and representation diminished Guimet’s authority as narrator. The porters who enabled their journey proved to be active, living agents rather than inert stories to be told by foreign visitors. Régamey’s first illustration of the rickshaw appears in Guimet’s chapter on their excursion from Yokohama to the former Shogunate capital at Kamakura [Fig. 3.5]. The title “En route! Les djinrikis” expresses their enthusiasm for the two-day tour with the English Consular Chaplain Buckworth B. Bailey, Charles Wirgman, an Englishman resident in Japan, and a local interpreter.60 Guimet wrote that two men operate each car, one pulling in front, the other pushing from behind [Fig. 3.6]. He wrote that his first ride in the jinrikisha was made uncomfortable by an awareness of the runner straining on every step, but he soon became a convert to the rickshaw, which was much better than the heavy, lacquered chair called a norimon, or the bamboo basket that he indifferently transcribed as kago or cango.61 Régamey made a quick, thumbnail sketch of Guimet wearing the pith helmet of all Western travelers, ferried by jinrikisha. No background of any kind is given except for small clouds of dust lifted by the rickshaw around the rear porter.62

3.5  Felix Régamey, Promenades japonaises, 1878, a Jinriki and his rickshaw

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3.6  Felix Régamey, Promenades japonaises, 1878, a Jinriki and Guimet

In addition to land travel, Régamey also sketched two rowers, whose bodies dwarf the distant steamship, visible in the triangle formed by their torsos [Fig. 3.7]. Throughout the narrative both writer and illustrator represented the jinrikisha drivers time and again. Velocity was a regular subject, whether a mad dash through the crowds of Tokyo, not unlike the ways of a horse-drawn London cab, or through the hills and valleys of Japan.63 The porters would take off at “a hellish” or “vertiginous” speed like horses nearing a stable, indifferent to the bone-breaking tumbles they inflicted on their passengers.64 On the excursion from Tokyo to Nikko, the Japanese moved like the wind at times, such that the landscape rushed past as in a train ride. Man turned into horse into machine in Guimet’s narrative.That coolies produce the effects of mechanized locomotion (“a suburban train”) was ordered by the author, who reasoned that he should get his money’s worth for paying two coolies to transport each European, in inverse relation to the local fee of one porter for two natives.65 But his crew fell short of a machine-like invincibility. On a grueling and much disputed stretch they moved at a “halting and sluggish pace.” Their “breathless and weakened” grunts, the author wrote, “their bleeding feet and sunken eyes, their shrunken noses and dry mouths made me worry that they would crash in exhaustion and pain.”66 In every instance Guimet was intimately aware of his troupe’s motions. 84

3.7  Felix Régamey, Promenades japonaises, two rowers, 1878

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In a similar way, Duret earlier described various transports used on his journey. First were the American transcontinental train, a comfortable “hôtel ambulant,” and then the luxurious trans-Pacific liner. But modern technology appeared to threaten, not facilitate, Duret’s goal. So developed was the infrastructure that one could reach Bombay from Europe via the Suez Canal in record time; once there, he lamented that “the schedules of the big steamships sailing between the different countries of Asia are as regular today as the omnibus service on your street.”67 The author’s interest was more than taxonomic. It was also a proof of his journey. Hence, Duret devoted more space to local forms: the jinrikisha was “an absolutely sui generis invention … a miniature car on two wheels with the peculiar feature that the driver doubles as the beast of burden.”68 In India, after months of animal traction, he was glad to give up “local color” for a train ride to Lahore. In northern China, the mule wagon was a method of torture: “One is constantly thrown from right to left against the sides of the cart, tossed from below, pushed to the front and forced to the rear! One is shaken to the bone and ends by having everything upside down – head, heart and stomach.”69 Duret and Cernuschi needed a convoy of horses, wagons, drivers, grooms, a cook, a Chinese interpreter, and a Mongolian one to reach Beijing. In Sri Lanka they were reduced at one point to “the mode of transport of primitive humanity,” an ox cart whose shaft was a tree trunk. The inventory of transportation, a common feature of travelogues, functions as a record of alterity and progress in Voyage en Asie. The rickshaw, wagon, or sampan showed the pre-modernity of the East, but they offered the real travel that locomotion threatened to displace.70 This emphasis on archaic modes abroad should not mislead us about contemporary France where all was not modern: human and animal traction ran alongside the latest technologies. The chaise à porteurs or sedan chair observed in Roman times appeared in France in the early seventeenth century.71 Louis-Sébastien Mercier captured the absurdity of corpulent men and elegant ladies tipped over in their chairs in the mud of eighteenth-century Paris.72 And on modern Parisian boulevards the conveyance had not entirely vanished: Walter Benjamin wrote that “in the year of Baudelaire’s death [1867], an entrepreneur could still cater to the comfort of the well-to-do with a fleet of five hundred sedan chairs circulating the city.”73 Other sources confirmed its use. Madame Celnart complained an a book of etiquette of 1863 that ladies were still condemned to the indignity of this relic in the provinces; the Grande Encyclopédie noted that chaises à porteurs operated in Paris in the 1830s and continued to do so outside the capital as late as 1888.74 In the movement of goods, brute force was by no means eradicated.75 For one, the primordial handcart lasted well into the twentieth century. Eugène Atget’s photograph of 1899 shows a chiffonnier, the preindustrial ragpicker, pushing a much burdened voiture à bras on Haussmann’s modern Avenue des Gobelins76 [Fig. 3.8]. Atget also recorded a large advertisement as late as 1923 for the hire of such equipment in Notre-Dame vue de la rue des Chantres et de la rue des Ursins.77 Conversely, pre-modern transports were not all that could be found in Asia. A traveler’s first impression of Japanese port cities in the 1870s was the throng of people, steamships, battleships, trains, and horse-drawn omnibuses. Local image-makers treated the theme in several media. Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826–1869) presented 86

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3.8  Eugène Atget, Un Chiffonnier le matin dans Paris, avenue des Gobelins, 1899

machine- and animal-driven vehicles of every kind in the series Thirty-One Views of Modern Tokyo. His Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo included foot traffic, wheelbarrows, donkey carts, horseback riding, horse-drawn carriage, sail, and steamship78 [Fig. 3.9]. That Guimet omitted any reference to locomotion in the first volume of Promenades japonaises was significant. His readers would have had no cause to imagine a railway in Japan at the time unless they had read the Le Monde illustré in mid February 1873, in which a full page of illustrations relayed the opening of the Tokyo-Yokohama line. 87

3.9  Utagawa Hiroshige II, Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo, ca.1874

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On Guimet’s arrival in 1876, he journeyed on these tracks. The Frenchman praised the train’s unindustrial, pleasant air, attended by uniformed employees in comfortable wagons. Significantly, the diverse meanings of Japanese nation-building, technology, and Western intervention appear in Hiroshige II’s work, a part of a large body of images of the railway. On the horizon of his composition were the first mechanized battleships in the country, for which Japan sought outside help.79 Guimet was aware of French participation when he noted that his countryman François Léonce Verny set up the new, modern arsenal at Yokosuka. But he feared that in two years it will be “a purely native” operation.80 Western technology played both material and motivational roles. As the historian Steven J. Ericson points out, Commodore Perry’s official gift to the Shogunate on his second voyage was a toy train, complete with several miles of track. The official artist for the American delegation in 1854 wrote that it had the greatest effect among all the gifts (including telegraph equipment): the Japanese gathered by the hundreds, so the record goes, to look at “the repeated circlings of the train with unabated pleasure and surprise, unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle.”81 The subsequent Meiji government quickly raised in London an international loan of £1 million to build the country’s own system. Figured at the very centre of Hiroshige II’s print, the locomotive inspired copious expression in text, image, song, and games.82 Throughout the 1870s, his follower Hiroshige III (1843–1894) repeatedly put the Shinbashi train station in his series on famous places (meisho-e) of Tokyo.83 Utagawa Yoshitora (active ca.1850 to 1880) also treated the growing network of travel. Old and new were juxtaposed in Yoshitora’s woodblock print of 1872, Railway Timetable (Tetsudo dokiannai), as a rickshaw driver ferried a Japanese lady in the foreground, running in parallel lines to a train in the middle ground, and modern ships in the distance. The Yokohama-Tokyo train schedule presided over the horizontal bands of traffic.84 It is a version of Clifford’s notion of “practices of displacement” that “might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than their simple transfer or extension.”85 More than the well-known European representations of mobility, Japanese images (including texts, songs, even board games) were invested with national and political sentiment: industrial capitalism, communications infrastructure equaled Japan’s identity and representation as a new power. Mobility and its various expressions were signifiers of both individual and collective identities.86 In 1872, the young Emperor Meiji opened the railway in a ceremony of several days. In 1912, his coffin was moved by a majestic train to Kyoto where it was transferred to an archaic palanquin on the shoulders of 52 men, and finally an ox-drawn hearse.87 The railway signified modern Japan as an imperial power, but earlier transports equally performed symbolic roles.88 Old and new, every vehicle in Hiroshige’s Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo had complex significations. Further attention to Japanese art of the time is rewarding. There is a fascinating yet overlooked example by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) in the Musée Guimet. Trained in the older Kanō school of Chinese-style ink painting current from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and also in the ukiyo-e tradition, he produced religious and genre paintings, extravagant demonic visions and satires. European and American visitors to Tokyo often contacted him, as did Guimet and Régamey, in September 1876. 89

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3.10  Kawanabe Kyōsai, drawing, 1876, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko, 1880

They recorded their visit to the artist at home in Promenades japonaises.89 Kiōsai repaid the courtesy when he painted for Guimet an image of the Buddha, Shakyamuni Undergoing Austerities.90 The artist further gave him as a religious image the quick sketch he made on his fan during their interview [Fig. 3.10]. The work belongs to a long tradition of using animal parody for social and political commentary. In some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, and drawings Kiōsai depicted animals (frogs being a privileged delegate) as vast armies in battle, fighters of demons, worshippers, and merrymakers of every variety. His sketch for Guimet showed an amphibian rickshaw driver taking a frog passenger towards an electricity pole. As art historians have noted, the span of Kiōsai’s career from the turbulent period between the arrival of Western warships to the constitution and limited representative democracy introduced in 1889, the year the artist died, led to the complex, if veiled, significations attributed to technology.91 Kiōsai’s claim to Guimet of religious meaning can no more be taken at face value than his work in the British Museum, Animals with Musical Instruments Dancing Around a Frog Dressed as a Shintō Priest, in which frogs dance to the music of a ménage of creatures while a larger frog in Shinto mitre joins with glee.92 Guimet would view the lone electricity pole on his fan as modernity’s advent in Japan, whereas Kiōsai insisted on native flora. The electricity wire stretched from a stem of lotus, the latter noted, and the rickshaw’s wheels were made of sacred foliage. Traditional Japan coexisted with a modern apparatus in this ambiguous image: the caricature indexed the multi-faceted reactions to modernity and Western intervention. Kiōsai’s vehicle in the fan was exactly what the Frenchmen employed to go from Tokyo to Nikko, not yet connected by rail. Guimet hired a convoy of seven jinrikisha and their corresponding pairs of drivers for this longer itinerary. He signed a contract that 90

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stipulated the price for 14 Japanese men to transport Régamey and himself, escorted by three native interpreters and a cook. He reproduced the document in the second volume of Promenades japonaises.93 Both his contract and the information on fares to classic destinations given in the British guidebook of 1881, A Handbook for Travellers in Central & Northern Japan, show a well regulated network. The Handbook recommended the palanquin (cango/ kago) for mountainous parts accessible by foot or pack-horse alone.94 Bird would write approvingly of the Land Transport Company (“Riku-un-kaisha”) that arranged tours by all of the above means at fixed rates and protected travelers from “difficulties, delays, and extortions” on the road.95 Like the railway, the various modes of transport had disruptive capacities. Guimet’s relation of his passage is vital to our grasp of how even the most humble Japanese both materially and pictorially disordered the model of the European traveler/collector. He obscured the risk at first through the already noted equine metaphor when describing the porters, known as jinrikis, which he wrote as djinrikis throughout the book.96 He further diminished their rank by subjecting them to a pseudo-ethnographic study of habits, attire, gesture, and manner. In a chapter such as “What the Djinrikis Eat” the author employed the method of an allegedly pure empiricism: We had hardly arrived when our men wiped the imperceptible sweat from their bodies with the little blue cloth that covers their head. This piece of cloth plays a big role in the life of the Japanese. It is a wash cloth in the morning, when dry, a head cover for both men and women, transformed into hoods, mitre, night caps, diadems, medieval beret, masks, and even shoulder pads for carrying heavy loads.97

In this contact between unequals, the Japanese had no name or identity, forming an anonymous, undifferentiated group. Yet their very physicality would require, even dominate, the traveler’s attention. Individuals would emerge to modify their rapport. Guimet singled out a “particularly gracious and attractive” porter, “vigorously and harmoniously muscled” as well as intelligent. He became the visitor’s informal language teacher.98 The coolie, dressed in no more than a light jacket and loincloth (fundoshi), came out on top again when he produced a better copy—in sand, no less, with a mere stick, like the shepherd boy Giotto—of the colossal Buddha at Kamakura than the professional illustrators Régamey and Wirgman.99 Other moments reveal the instability of rank. Negotiations were not infrequent. On one occasion, after an exceptionally arduous trek, the jinrikis asked to stop before the planned destination for the night. Guimet assured the readers of his sympathy, but explained that he refused in order to maintain control. When threatened with abandonment, he knew exactly what to do. He instructed them to decide whether to honor their original contract, a move that “had the effect of instantly calming the rebels.” He described how the men rubbed their exhausted limbs with alcohol, wrapped their bleeding feet, and cried in rhythm to continue each step, like Egyptian oarsmen on the Nile. On arrival at the hotel, a delegation of jinrikis took Guimet aback with their many prostrations to ask for a tip. Relations went awry again when they rejected his offer as inadequate. Guimet recounted that while throwing the coolies out of his room 91

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“Kedjiro [the delegate] kept laughing. Kondo [the translator] put aside the baksheesh that they would be glad to accept the next day.”100 That Guimet was the master of each situation is less jarring than his two references to Egypt—the oarsmen and baksheesh, the Arabic term for tip—in his account of Japan. These allusions are clarified when we turn to his first travelogue, Croquis égyptiens: Journal d’un touriste. Guimet remarked at the outset that locals responded equally to gratuity and abuse. A small tip, “quelques bakchichs (étrennes),” was enough to secure a private car on the train, but when politeness brought nothing, the curses of a fellow visitor (“Monsieur G.R.”) produced immediate obedience. Violence and reward always went hand in hand in Egypt. “Much bakchich and many more lashings of the cane” were necessary to have his luggage put on the train. Or again, “one always finished by smacking them a bit and they only thank you when you have given them as many cuffs as coins.”101 As always, the foreigner’s greatest contact with the local population concerned transportation. It was an intimate one, as when Bedouins carried him to the top of the pyramid: “I abandoned myself to three half naked Arabs; one took my right hand, the other, my left, and a third prepared to push me from behind.”102 The traveler’s vulnerability is evident here as elsewhere in his account. On this and other occasions, he used his newly acquired vocabulary, “Mafich bakchich! (Pas de pourboire.)”103 The award or denial of gratuity is a constant theme in Croquis égyptiens, recurring at every new sight and experience. His memory of Egyptian oarsmen upon hearing the cries of the jinrikis thus highlights one form of European purchasing power abroad. The prevalence of bakchich in Croquis égyptiens and its reemergence in Promenades japonaises underscore the politics of travel in the nineteenth century. But Guimet was not always in command; at times he was unsure, even anxious. In a boat on the Nile he pondered with other tourists the reason for the crew’s claim of impassibility. “We dare not insist too much because these people would be willing to throw themselves against the rocks and us too, of course, just to earn a few sovereigns.”104 In Japan he feared for his safety when the porters grew belligerent with drink: “the saké takes its toll on our porters who might well abandon us.”105 Insofar as postcolonial theorists seek indications in the text to undermine hegemonic colonial discourse, the traveler’s moments of anxiety would be exactly those signs. But Europeans had other means of assimilation. Guimet used classical antiquity as a symbolic apparatus of power. Even before he disembarked in Yokohama harbor, he saw local stevedores as Titus, Brutus, and Cicero, dressed in “Latinate robes,” their “fine, delicate, and pure features not at all Asiatic.”106 Once on land, the Frenchman perceived Plato and Socrates among native schoolboys.107 Such comparisons recur throughout his volumes. We find this in Hübner, who wrote with homoerotic flavor that travel in Japan, “surrounded by men with little or no clothes,” helped him to understand Attic and Corinthian sculpture.108 Guimet declared in the same vein that French students were wasting their time at the École de Rome, for “it is here that they can study the human form in action. To see antique statues is good; to see living statues is better.”109 However, the transposition of a Western past to modern Japan was not fail proof. Gender and class played determining roles. Isabella Bird also wrote in a quasi-ethnographic voice, noting that “these kuruma-runners wore short blue cotton drawers, short blue cotton shirts with wide sleeves, and open in front, reaching to their waists, and blue cotton 92

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3.11  Felix Régamey, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko, 1880, jinrikis at rest

handkerchiefs knotted round their heads .…”110 But as a woman she could not allow herself to see Japanese men in Graeco-Roman forms. Bird found the opposite—“small, ugly, kindly-looking, shrivelled, bandy-legged, round-shouldered, concave-chested, poor-looking beings .…” Whereas Hübner stressed what he termed “the very types of masculine strength and beauty,” she repeatedly noted the “miserable physique and the national defects of concave chests and bow legs.”111 The disparity reflects not the actual experience, but the mutual impact of gender, class, and the materiality of travel. The daily and close encounter with native laborers required women to adopt narrative strategies of discretion. Bird preempted any hint of impropriety by insisting that Japanese men were “ugly” and “hideous,” a display of chauvinism in her otherwise sympathetic account. Modernity, mobility, and masculinity intersect in complex ways to shape representations of both visitors and natives. Travel disordered classic representations. The Eastern man was not the immobile feminine Other; the Western woman was more active than expected. Régamey figured such mutability, not in every case by design. He idealized the bodies of six porters, each endowed with long muscular limbs and mighty chests worthy of Greek gods and Olympians, attended by two women112 [Fig. 3.11]. The bodies and poses recall the académie, an exercise familiar to Régamey, as to any French artist in the nineteenth century.113 Travel, observation, and portrayal here assume a homosociality between two parties. The artist’s emphasis on a robust physique, as in Guimet’s narration, creates a view of the laborers as identical members of a team. 93

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The seated pair on the left is mirrored by the pair on the right; the crouching figure is matched by his opposite number across the hearth. The vigor of the bodies at rest presupposed the same bodies at work, and when at work, carrying Guimet in a cango in The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko, they are manifestly drawn on a classical template114 [Fig. 3.12]. Think of the virile athletes on any Greek vase. Imagine the Doryphoros of Polykleitos rotated by 90 degrees toward us in the composition of the rear porter [Fig. 3.13]. We might see the reaction of Hübner, Guimet, and Régamey as a variation on Delacroix finding Romans and Greeks at his doorstep in Morocco—a form of classicizing primitivism,115 or what Johannes Fabian termed a “denial of coevalness,” a refusal of the contemporaneity of the Other in relation to the self that confines the former to an archaic state.116 For Guimet, Hübner, and Régamey, the turn to antiquity was a deficiency, a way to manage difference. Until they regained the terra firma of a Graeco-Roman template, they were in fact incapable of representation. Guimet wrote that during their first amble through Yokohama, each step revealed an unknown fact, a new shape, an unfamiliar type, an unexpected costume.”117 The foreignness left them at a loss: But how to note these infinite details that are all new? Félix has his pencil, but he leaves it in his pocket, not knowing from which end to approach this fantastic and harmonious environment. As for me, I have my notebook, but what to do with it?118

It was only when they recovered familiar codes, a fusion of primitivism and classicism, that they could represent what they saw. Here again, a cross-cultural comparison with Japanese imagery is rewarding. The subject of travel par excellence was the historic, 300-mile Tōkaidō Road (the Eastern Sea Road,) on part of which Guimet and Régamey had already journeyed.119 Connecting Tokyo (Edo) and Kyoto, it was the most trafficked route, used for ritual visits to the Shogun in Tokyo or the imperial capital of Kyoto. European traders were required to make an annual pilgrimage. Kæmpfer described at great length the official convoy of the Dutch East India Company in which he took part in the 1690s.120 In the translated English volume, plate 22 shows a cortege of men and animals winding their way across the landscape. The important figures in palanquins are at the bottom of the page, grooms on foot and riding officers in the middle, and minders lead the procession at the top of the image. The serpentine line of men and animals, all in profile, zigzags across the page from left to right. Several are numbered on the plate and identified in the text. Such was the author’s attention to the whole procedure that he had various accoutrements—banners, parasols, an armchair, a bow and arrow—depicted around the scene, on the borders.121 Japanese novels, stories, and guidebooks also treated the Tōkaidō Road in both elite and popular forms over the centuries.122 Ukiyo-e artists added it to the meisho-e, or “views of famous places” category, pictured in both albums of single-sheet prints and in handscrolls.123 The typical series contained 55 views, comprising the 53 villages along the way and the end points of Tokyo and Kyoto.124 Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861) made two series.125 Utagawa Hiroshige III (1797–1858) created highly popular images 94

3.12  Felix Régamey, The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko, oil on canvas, 1876–1878

3.13  Felix Régamey, The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko, detail

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3.14  Utagawa Hiroshige III, Changing Horses at Fujieda, 1831–1834, Hoeido edition

based on his own journey in 1832.126 Pilgrims, travelers, and porters regularly dot the landscape, but in Utagawa Hiroshige III’s series (which established his prominence as second only to Hokusai), the last group figures in only a small fraction of prints, despite their ubiquity on the road. The example here shows the porters bent in half, posteriors in the air, neither dignified nor monumental [Fig. 3.14]. They appear awkward and comical, in contrast to Régamey’s idealized forms. Asymmetrically composed, the Japanese work further contrasts the tidy arrangement of bodies in an oval in the French version, centered on the page in the typical manner of European representations. There are no heroic forms here. In Promenades japonaises, the Western canon revealed its limits when the non-Western body was covered in native emblems, hence doubly foreign [Fig. 3.15]. We find Régamey at a loss again in the face of what Guimet called “other djinrikis of a superbe form.” They gathered to examine Régamey sketching with Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), the polyglot, English-born resident in Japan who served as an interpreter for the British legation on an intermittent basis and allegedly helped with the British contract to build the Japanese railway in 1870.127 In his ethnographic depiction, Régamey used Wirgman, briefly a member of the excursion, as a proxy for himself in the performance of his role as eyewitness and illustrator.128 For once it is not a view of Guimet in a rickshaw. It is an artist on his feet, engaged in the uniquely Western practice of sketching en plein air. Régamey’s image betrays the challenge of the subaltern to representation. In Guimet’s text, the hierarchy between Western observer and native object is maintained by such remarks as “among the drudges who stopped to give their advice were naked men whose torso and back were decorated by artistic tattoos.”129 The relationship of viewer and 96

3.15  Felix Régamy, Promenades japonaises, 1878, Wirgman sketching with Japanese onlookers

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3.16  Anonymous illustration in Joseph-Alexandre Hübner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871

viewed is more ambiguous in the illustration, however, made so in part by Régamey’s handling of multiple inscriptions and viewing positions. The coexistence of local and foreign offers a self-reflexive scene, a moment of mutual curiosity. The onlookers are enthralled by the foreigner’s notations on paper, just as Régamey, standing outside the image, is captivated by the drawing on skin. Like the children excluded from the central action, the viewer exterior to the scene is also denied access to the sketchbook. We are drawn in any case to the tattooed figure who commands a fascination that the visitor cannot match. The contrasting pair underlines dress and undress as signs of class. The worker’s nakedness, on which all travelers commented, identifies the laboring body as classed. His metaphorical garb of colorful animals and figures, noted by Bird as “not only a favourite adornment, but a substitute for perishable clothing,” is another marker.130 Both in and outside the pictorial frame, he could upset foreigners and residents alike. The subaltern body threatened a class-based decorum; Meiji authorities would forbid both public nudity and tattoos.131 Régamey was unfamiliar with the native repertory of famous courtesans, goddesses, animals, and legends that variously denoted the occupations and social identities of the bearers.132 More important here is the fact that the illegible emblem of local meaning displaced the moral qualities denoted by the marmoreal, Olympian body of Western art. The tattooed figure made classical antiquity an inadequate model, leaving Régamey to struggle for the first time. The porter’s left hand is badly drawn, the foreshortening of fingers awkward, the thumb splayed. His arm seems distended and his elbow narrows where it should not. The inscribed body forced the Frenchman to attend to morphology at the cost of fluency of drawing which he ably demonstrated elsewhere. The challenge 98

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led to the compressed group on the left, a jumble of heads and fragmented limbs that cannot be easily traced to their owners, and on the right, the giant leaning over the artist’s shoulder. In this encounter the traveler lost command. The awkwardness of the drawing is a mark of local resistance.133 If the European visitors wanted to enjoy the power associated with mobility, conjugated with masculinity and modernity, as well as the power of employers over workers, they were not always successful in such representation. The engraving of Hübner in a cango [Fig. 3.16], Krafft’s photograph of a visitor to Japan, and Régamey’s Sacred and Profane Bridges of Nikko each presents reversals of which the European travelers were unaware. Local transport overturned Western iconography in the most fundamental way. The porters’ stride in Régamey’s canvas highlights Guimet’s folded, defenseless body, a mere parcel for the strapping natives. Labor relations showed a dependence, in other words, a lack of the bodily autonomy that also stood for European masculine individuality. The somatic experience of Guimet and Régamey contested the power intrinsic to representation; both writer and illustrator lost their authority to speak for the subaltern. Like Schivelbusch, Michel de Certeau described the train passenger as “pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car.”134 S/he is “incarcerated” in de Certeau’s term, yet mobile and relatively secure when compared to those in rickshaws and palanquins. The topsy-turviness is manifest in the image of Hübner on the road, all the more conspicuous when viewed against an icon of Parisian modernity. Manet’s Olympia [Fig. 3.17].

3.17  Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863–1865, oil on canvas

99

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For this unlikely couple, the venues are different as are the acolytes, though nonWestern in both cases. But the bearing is the same, the left leg over the right, and the shod foot on top. Olympia famously looks at the viewer, whereas the passenger/ parcel in Japan looks away. More importantly, her left hand conceals her sex, while Hübner holds a fan. The unnamed artist put this article at the center of the image, radiating its implications outward. The fan’s shape rhymes with Hübner’s posture, the left edge parallel to the torso, the right, the lower leg. It is a synecdoche of a body repeatedly collapsed and unfolded, wedged in the fan-shaped chair. The traveler himself complained that one had to “unscrew one’s legs” to be able to enjoy the cango as “the vicinity of the bearer before you obliges you to double up your legs under you.”135 The fan in Europe—imported from Japan—had strong erotic resonance, evoking such idols of feminine sensuality as royal mistresses or Venus herself as Susan Hiner notes in a new study of nineteenth-century culture. Earlier, “fan” was English slang for female genitalia.136 Europeans could not have failed to recognize the item as an instrument of feminine dress, posture, and seduction. In Hübner’s hand, the fan was a transvestic object that highlighted the exchange of gender roles between East and West. And if, as Marian Aguiar points out in her recent study of the Indial railway, European trains reinforced class lines through the price of tickets and the seats on which the holders were allowed, Hübner’s physical suspension in the Japanese cango echoes a suspension of class, gender, and identifiable setting (versus Olympia on firm ground, on a bed that occupies half the canvas).137 There are two transpositions here: Hübner’s reclining body takes on Olympia’s gender while the Japanese coolies share her nakedness as class.138 Hübner plainly had no idea when he climbed into the cango that it would turn him into an odalisque. The oblivion of travelers and their illustrators is the subaltern’s inversion. And it is a double one: the native effectively ventriloquized the foreign ventriloquist, letting him picture his own undoing. If travelers wished to show their power in repose, they did so at the cost of traditional codes of Western masculinity. The native laborers became active, hypermasculinized (if still unindividuated) actors.139 One final image demonstrates a disturbance of gender on the road. Guimet and Régamey poked gentle fun at the advent of bold women abroad, “une de ces Anglaises à l’humeur voyageuses” (like Bird, or one of her colleagues), equipped with fetish binoculars140 [Fig. 3.18]. Régamey shows a faceless creature from behind, clad in the regulation pith helmet. This odd apparition startled both man and god at Nikko. Is it her gaze or her long bamboo stick, not unlike those used by Hübner’s and Krafft’s Japanese coolies, that caused alarm? No Olympia she, the lady is erect and poised, in contrast to her male colleagues. The authors again did not realize that West and non-West no longer matched up neatly with the familiar polarities of active masculine and passive feminine. Westerners could not traverse East Asia in the manner of conquering heroes. Instead they were domesticated by the locals who conveyed them. But it would be too optimistic to see in these images a permanent reversal of power. There are limits to representation. 100

3.18  Felix Régamey, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko, 1880, Traveling Englishwoman

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

The museums of Europe ultimately domesticated the East through the ownership and exhibition of the latter’s material cultures. Display, another representational practice, excluded the foreign labors and physical contacts so vividly experienced by Guimet and Régamey on the road. This prehistory—the shipping and handling of the collection— would have no place in the Musée Guimet in the nineteenth century, nor today. Attention to private somatic experience advances our conceptualizations of historiography. The personal and physical had an actively constitutive rather than reflective relation to historical processes. Western travelers contributed to the variable balance of power within and beyond the artistic register. On a larger scale, the ground beneath their feet was continually moving. Japan emerged as an economic and military leader in East Asia.141 In 1876, its gunboat diplomacy secured the Treaty of Kanghwa that gave Japan access to trading ports in Korea and extraterritorial jurisdiction of the kind that Japan had ceded to the West, as we noted in Chapter 1. It fortified its control of Korea when it won the Sino-Japanese war in 1894 to1895. Japan achieved formal equality with North Atlantic powers through the revision of earlier treaties and even defeated a Western representative, Russia, in 1904.142 In the realm of technology, the railway grew from its first line of 18 miles in 1872 to 1000 miles in 1890, and 5000 in 1902 (still far behind the 25,000 miles across France and 36,000 in Germany at the time). The tables turned in 1964, when world leaders in transport went to examine the Japanese bullet train that set the new international standard for high-speed rail.143 In its own way Hiroshige II’s Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo of 1874 contributed to the imperialist project. No less than Europe, Japan followed its own colonial drive. In the visual field the native jinrikis challenged the usual modes of description, troubling the inherent power of representation. The little examined travel imagery above offers new means to study cross-cultural encounters. There was a price for European mobility in Asia. While the visitors acquired objects and experiences in Japan, they gave up narrative authority. Unforeseen equivalences and inversions of power complicated the exchange between East and West. Notes 1 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878) and Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880). 2 Another example is Gaston Migeon, curator of the Asian department at the Louvre, who wrote Au Japon: Promenades aux sanctuaires de l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1908), in which he described many of the same sites as Guimet and others. 3 Guimet provides a map of his route in Promenades japonaises (1878), 185. 4 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–314. She refers to “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–77. Also Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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The Labor of Travel 5 Elisabeth Fraser, “Images of Uncertainty: Delacroix and Nineteenth-Century Expansionism,” in Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, ed. Mary Sheriff (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 123–51. A long bibliography exists of postcolonial perspectives in visual studies that cannot be fully treated here. See two recent anthologies, Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Geoff Quilley and Dian Kriz, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 6 Elisabeth Fraser is completing a book titled Mediterranean Encounters: Artists in the Ottoman Empire 1780–1850. 7 Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 9. 8 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 edition). James Buzard examines the relationship between tourism and cultural production in an earlier period in The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800– 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 9 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 10 Ginette Verstraete, “Heading for Europe: Tourism and the Global Itinerary of an Idea,” in Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World, eds. Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 33–52. 11 Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2008), 21–41. 12 See Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds., Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York and London: Guildford Press, 1994), especially Sara Mills, “Knowledge, Gender, and Empire,” 29–50. 13 See Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Creswell, eds., Gendered Mobilities (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 14 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32. 15 Ibid., 23. 16 Le Jubilé du Musée Guimet, 25e anniversaire de sa fondation, 1879–1904 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1904), iv. 17 Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133. 18 See Guimet’s first published catalogue, Catalogue des objets exposés précédé d’un aperçu des religions de l’Inde, de la Chine et du Japon (Lyons: Imprimerie Pitrat Aîné, 1880), 96–103. Also Le Jubilé, i. 19 Le Jubilé, i. 20 Ibid., ii–iii. 21 Jean-François Jarrige, “La rénovation du musée Guimet,” Arts asiatiques 55 (2000): 164–7, . Bernard Frank, Le Panthéon bouddhique au Japon. Collections d’Émile Guimet (Paris: RMN, 1991), 54. The Cambodian collection of Étienne Aymonier (1844–1929) and the former Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro (Louis Delaporte, 1842–1925, curator) joined the Musée Guimet in 1927, 1931, and 1935.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 22 Jarrige, “Le rénovation du musée Guimet,” 164, excavations in central Asia and China by Paul Pelliot and Édouard Chavannes, objects from the Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro, and excavations of the Délégation Archéologique Française in Afghanistan progressively entered the Musée Guimet in the 1920s and 1930s. See also the museum website, . 23 Françoise Chappuis and Francis Macouin, eds., D’outremer et d’Orient mystique: Les itinéraries d’Émile Guimet (Paris: Éditions Findakly, 2001), 31. 24 Guimet, Huits jours aux Indes (Paris: Hachette, 1889) and a new edition (Paris: Phébus, 2007). 25 See Frank, Le Panthéon bouddhique, 18–27. 26 Le Jubilé, v. Chappuis and Macouin, D’outremer, 56–60. 27 See Frank, Le Panthéon bouddhique, 29, who had full access to the collection which he examined. 28 I rely on Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, for the following. 29 Guimet, Rapport au Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts sur la mission scientifique de M. Émile Guimet dans l’Extrême Orient (Lyon: Imprimerie de Bellon, 1877), 2–4. 30 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 267, “Singulier signe des temps. Voici des Européens admis à des cérémonies auxquelles ne peuvent assister les Japonais qui ne sont ni prêtres, ni grands seigneurs; voici des étrangers qui sont reçus avec tous les honneurs possibles dans les lieux mêmes où, il y a quelques années, leur présence eût été punie de mort.” 31 Guimet, Rapport, 4. See Frank, Le Panthéon bouddhique, for a complete study of the religious sculptures collected by Guimet, especially 164–85 regarding the mandala. 32 Marcuse, Negations, 131. 33 Guimet, Rapport, 9. 34 Le Jubilé, iii. 35 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 4. 36 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 37 See Julie Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, la Gare Saint-Lazare, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998) for reproductions and scholarly discussion. 38 See Valérie Sueur-Hermel, ed., Daumier: L’écriture du lithographe (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2008), 80, 124–5. 39 For commentary and illustration of Daumier’s caricature published in Le Charivari, 1848, see Marc Desportes, Paysages en mouvement. Transports et perception de l’espace XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) 124. 40 Cf. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). Another lithograph published in Le Charivari, on March 16, 1864, shows two men and a woman equally worried about safety. The image is part of a series on Les Moments difficiles de la vie, reproduced in Sueur-Hermel, Daumier, 124, no. 122. 41 Daumier, Impressions et compressions de voyage in Le Charivari, July 25, 1843, reproduced in Desportes, Paysages en mouvement, 127. Sueur-Hermel, Daumier, 80.

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The Labor of Travel 42 K.E. Maison, Honoré Daumier. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), vol.1, paintings, no. I-39, I-109, I-165, I-166, I-178, I-179, and Vol.2, watercolours and drawings, no. 287–311. For commentary, see Bruce Laughton, Honoré Daumier (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 109–26; also Desportes, Paysages en mouvement, 122– 32. 43 Larry Duffy, Le Grand Transit Moderne: Mobility, Modernity, and French Naturalist Fiction (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005). The reference to Zola is on page 91. 44 Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, 105–6. In addition to St-Lazare station and its related structures, Monet also painted the railway bridge and train station at Argenteuil. 45 Ibid., 47, 77–80, 103–6. 46 Felice Beato’s hand-colored photographs were published in an album in 1884 and in 1891 as Album de 81 photographies rehaussées de couleurs de personnage et sites du Japon. A photograph of a Japanese passenger in a kago and a lady in a jinrikisha (rickshaw) are reproduced in Bernard Marbot, Objectif Cipango. Photographies anciennes du Japon (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, Audiovisuel, 1990), 40. A colored photograph of a Japanese lady in a kago appears in Hélène Bayou, Felice Beato et l’école de Yokohama (Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1994), plate 8. 47 Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, Jinrikisha Days in Japan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891). 48 For more on Isabella Bird, see Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2001), 133–74. 49 Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881), 26–9. First published in 1880 by John Murray, London. I refer to the 1881 edition. 50 Ibid., 1:82. 51 Ibid., 1:344. 52 Hübner, Ramble Round the World, 1871, trans. Mary Herbert (London, Macmillan and Co., 1878), 230. 53 Ibid., 236. 54 Suzanne Esmein, “Hugues Krafft (1853–1935), voyageur, photographe, et collectionneur,” L’Ethnographie 86, no. 108 (1990): 151–80. 55 Ibid., 155. Félix Régamey, Le Japon pratique (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1891), 213–29. 56 Hugues Krafft, Souvenirs de notre tour du monde (Paris: Hachette, 1885). For more on Krafft, see John Clark, Japanese Exchanges in Art 1850s to 1930s with Britain, Continental Europe, and the USA (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 57. Annette Leduc Beaulieu, “Hugues Krafft’s Midori-no-sato: The Art of Bringing Zen to the West,” in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds., TwentyFirst-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 162–70. Gabriel Weisberg, “Lost and Found: S. Bing’s Merchandising of Japonisme and Art Nouveau,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 2 (Summer 2005), . See also Marbot, Objectif Cipango, 57. 57 See Suzanne Esmein, Hugues Krafft au Japon de Meiji. Photographies d’un voyage, 1882–1883 (Paris: Hermann, 2003), 36, for a photograph of a rickshaw driver and his jinrikisha in the snow; ibid., 41, photograph of a loaded pack-horse and groom on Tōkaidō; ibid., 51, photograph of “Deux rikisha montant,” two men pulling rickshaw. Krafft wrote in his letters that one vehicle carried his photography equipment on his journey. 58 Esmein, Hugues Krafft (1853–1935), 156.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 59 It is noteworthy that the experiences of using native vehicles to go from one place to another were systematically treated by Western travelers to the East. Kæmpfer included lengthy illustrated discussions. See Bodart-Bailey, Kæmpfer’s Japan, 270–438. 60 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 57. 61 Ibid., 59. Régamey complained in his journal on October 4, 1876 that the cango is the most horrible way to travel in the world. See in Keiko Omoto and Francis Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde (Paris: Gallimard and RMN, 2001), 64. 62 Régamey’s small sketch was not published in Promenades japonaises. It is reproduced by Omoto and Macouin, Quand le Japon, 64. 63 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 40. 64 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 76, 182. 65 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 180. 66 Ibid., 214, “Lors ils se frottent les membres avec de l’eau-de-vie, se mettent du sel cuisant sur les écorchures des pieds, se chaussent de sandales neuves et, comme pendant la discussion la nuit est arrivée, chacun se munit d’une longue lanterne blanche.” 67 Duret, Voyage, 203–4, “... tous ces itinéraries des grands paquebots entre les diverses terres d’Asie sont aujourd’hui aussi réguliers que ceux des omnibus qui passent par votre rue.” Ibid., 359, “Bombay est aujourd’hui à la porte de l’Europe; depuis le canal de Suez, les bateaux à vapeur partis d’Europe arrivent à Bombay en une vingtaine de jours. Il en arrive et il en part presque tous les jours. D’ici on va en Europe et on en revient pour un rien et sans y penser; ce n’est plus qu’un saut.” 68 Ibid., 11, “Le jinriksha est une chose absolument sui generis. C’est une voiture en miniature, montée sur deux roues, qui a cela de particulier que le cocher fait en même temps office de monture et traîne le véhicule. C’est du reste une invention nouvelle au Japan.” 69 Ibid., 94. For an illustration of a “Peking Cart” see Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999), 103, drawn and first published by Elisa Scidmore in China: The Long-Lived Empire (New York: Century, 1900). 70 See all of Duret’s descriptions of locomotives in Voyage, 11, 78, 88, 90, 94, 102–3, 111–12, 156–7, 165, 203, 211, 212, 239, 249, 250–55, 256, 260, 288, 340, 341, 348, 353, 354, 359. 71 Le Grande encyclopédie: inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Paris: H. Lamiraut, 1885– 1902), 10:219. 72 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris. Nouvelle édition, corrigée et augmentée, tome VI (Amsterdam: 1783; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), Chapitre 479, “Chaise-à-Porteur,” 77–9. 73 Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 84. 74 Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 227n34, citing Élisabeth-Félicie Bayle-Mouillard, Nouveau manuel complet de la bonne compagnie, ou guide de la politesse et de la bienséance, nouvelle édition augmentée par Mme Celnart (Paris: Roret, 1863), 28. Also La Grande encyclopédie, 10:219–20. 75 One can refer to Monet’s only representation of urban labor, The Coal Workers, of 1875 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, RF1993.21), in which rows of men discharge coal from a barge. 76 Atget, Un Chiffonnier le matin dans Paris, avenue des Gobelins, 1899, in Paris pittoresque, first series, BnF Estampes G45842, reproduced in Atget, une retrospective, exh. cat. (Paris: BnF/Hazan, 2007), 135.

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The Labor of Travel 77 Atget, Notre-Dame vue de la rue des Chantres et de la rue des Ursins, 1923, in Art dans le vieux Paris series, Musée Carnavalet, PH 003815, reproduced in Atget, une retrospective, 153. 78 Utagawa Hiroshige II, Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama, Tokyo (original title, Tokyo Yatsuyama Shimokaigan Jōkisha Tetsudō no zu) triptych, woodblock print, 1874, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.83.245.11a-c). 79 See Elisabeth de Touchet, Quand les Français armaient le Japon: La Création de l’arsenal de Yokosuka 1865–1882 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003). 80 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 67. 81 Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle. Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4, citing Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan. 82 Ibid., 53–7. 83 Examples from Utagawa Hiroshige III’s Tokyo meisho series can be seen at the website . 84 Reproduced in John W. Dower, Yokohama Boomtown: Foreigners in Treaty-Port Japan (1859–1872), online exhibition published by MIT 2005 in collaboration with Sackler Gallery, Chapter 6, “Internationalism,” 6–4. Viewable at . 85 Clifford, Routes, 3. 86 Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 21. 87 Ibid., 149–54. 88 The same is true of the West: think of the gilded, horse-drawn carriages used for occasions such as royal weddings and funerals. 89 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 187–91. 90 Kiōsai’s Shakyamuni Undergoing Austerities of 1876 is in the Musée Guimet. The hanging scroll of ink, color, and gold on silk is discussed and reproduced in Timothy Clark, The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai (London: The British Museum Press, 1993), 76. 91 I rely on Clark, The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, 13–33 for this discussion. See also Oikawa Shigeru, Timothy Clark and Matthi Förrer, Comic Genius: Kawanabe Kyōsai (Tokyo: Shinbun, 1996). Hugo K. Weihe, “Some Unknown Works by Kawanabe Kyōsai,” Artibus Asiae 52, vol. 1, no. 2 (1992), Notice II, unpaginated. Kyōsai’s pupil, the American architect Josiah Conder, published Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyōsai (Tokyo: 1911). 92 See Clark, The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, 150–81, based on the British Museum’s large collection of his satiric animal paintings. Animal with Musical Instruments Dancing Around a Frog Dressed as a Shintō Priest (British Museum Japanese Painting, 1650; 1881.12-10.01865) is in ibid., 173, no. 49. 93 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 197. 94 Ernest Mason Satow and A.G.S. Hawes, Handbook for Travellers in Central & Northern Japan. Being a Guide to Tōkiō, Kiōto, Ōzaka, and Other Cities; the Most Interesting Parts of the Main Island between Kōbe and Awomori, with ascents of the Principal Mountains, and Descriptions of Temples, Historical Notes and Legends (Yokohama: Kelly & Co.; Shanghai & Hongkong: Kelly & Walsh, 1881), xix. 95 Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1:145.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 96 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 59–60. 97 Ibid., 70, “A peine arrivés, nos hommes essuient la sueur imperceptible de leurs corps avec la petite serviette bleue qui orne leurs têtes. Ce morceau d’étoffe joue un grand rôle dans la vie du Japonais. C’est le linge de toilette qui éponge l’eau du bain matinal, puis, une fois sèche sur les épaules, c’est la coiffure des hommes et souvent des femmes; ils en font à volonté des capuchons, des mitres, des bonnets pour la nuit, des diadèmes, des bérets moyen âge à aigrette, des masques, des casques, des couronnes à torsades, des coussinets pour les fardeaux, etc., etc.” 98 Ibid., 118, “Un de mes hommes est particulièrement gracieux et avenant; son type aquilin, très-délicat, n’a rien de mongolique; son corps, petit et un peu grêle, est néanmoins vigoureux et harmonieusement musclé. Il paraît fort intelligent, et c’est sans contredit le meilleur de mes deux professeurs de japonais.” 99 Ibid., 121. 100 Ibid., 216, “Alors l’affaire se gâte et je suis obligé de les envoyer promener, ce qui ne s’effectue pas sans quelques protestations. Kédjiro rit toujours. Kondo met en réserve le bakchich qu’ils seront bien heureux de retrouver demain.” 101 Guimet, Croquis égyptiens. Journal d’un touriste (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1867), 24, “19 novembre. Grâce à quelques bakchichs (étrennes) donnés aux employés, nous avons pu avoir un wagon pour nous seuls, et le voyage a été d’une gaieté charmante.” Ibid., 163, “De retour au bateau, les Âniers nous demandent des bakchichs, cela va sans dire; mais comme ils ne sont jamais satisfaits, on finit toujours par leur flanquer des coups, et ils ne vous remercient que quand on leur a distribué autant de calottes que d’étrennes.” 102 Ibid., 101–2, “Je m’abandonne à trois Arabes à moitié nus; l’un me prend la main droite, l’autre la main gauche et le troisième se prépare à me pousser par derrière.” 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 221, “Est-ce encore une question de bakchich? Nous n’osons pas trop insister, car, pour gagner quelques napoléons, ces gens seraient capables de se jeter dans les rochers, et nous avec, bien entendu.” 105 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 284. 106 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 12. 107 Ibid., 29. 108 Hübner, Ramble Round the World, 269. 109 Guimet, Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 116, “Que font donc en Italie nos élèves de l’École de Rome? C’est ici qu’ils pourraient étudier le jeu des muscles en plein travail. Voir des statues antiques, c’est bien; voir des statues vivantes, c’est mieux.” 110 Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1:81–2. 111 Ibid., 1:17, 27. Hübner, Ramble Round the World, 269. 112 Régamey made several other drawings of rickshaws and their drivers that appeared in both volumes of Promenades japonaises. 113 My thanks to Pamela Warner for pointing this out. 114 When shown in Guimet’s display at the Exposition Universelle in the same year, an accompanying leaflet, Notice explicative sur les objets exposés par M. Emile Guimet et sur les peintures et dessins faits par M. Félix Régamey (Paris: Ernest Leroux, libraire de la Société asiatique de l’École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, 1878), 40, described Régamey’s canvas as depicting “two bridges of red lacquer with gilt armatures [that] lead to the holy forest; the one on the left is used only once a year by the Mikado’s delegates on their way to pay homage to the remains of the Shogun Yeyas.”

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The Labor of Travel 115 Eugène Delacroix, Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, ed. André Joubin (Paris: Plon, 1936), 1:329–30, “les Romains et les Grecs sont là, à ma porte.” 116 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 121. Fraser, “Images of Uncertainty,” 137, draws on Fabian to make a different point: Delacroix denies paradoxically a European coevalness in his travel sketches by not representing the French diplomatic community that facilitated his travels in North Africa. Thus he “occludes the conditions of his observation and access,” producing “the erasure of authorial presence in the Moroccan drawings.” 117 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 14, “Néanmoins nous voilà partis dans Yokohama à la recherche des impressions, et chaque pas nous révèle un fait inconnu, un contour nouveau, un type ignoré, un costume imprévu.” 118 Ibid., “Mais comment noter ces détails infinis et tous nouveaux? Félix a son crayon, mais il le laisse dormir dans sa poche, ne sachant par quel bout prendre cette nature harmonieuse et fantasque. Moi, j’ai mon calepin, mais qu’en faire?” 119 Chappuis and Macouin, D’outremer, 48, notes that a third volume of Promenades japonaises was advertised and slated to be on the Tōkaidō. It was never published. Several passages in Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 178 chronicled the experience. 120 Kæmpfer, History of Japan. 121 See Ting Chang, “Collecting Asia: Théodore Duret’s Voyage en Asie and Henri Cernuschi’s Museum,” Oxford Art Journal, 25 no. 2 (Spring 2002): 29 for an illustration. 122 See Jilly Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road. Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Shirahata Yōzaburō, “The Printing of Illustrated Travelogues in Eighteenth-century Japan,” in Written Texts – Visual Texts. Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan, eds. Susanne Formanek and Sept Linhart (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005), 199–213, on the volume and circulation of illustrated guides and a bibliography of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury publications. In the same volume, Franziska Ehmcke, “The Tōkaidō Woodblock Print Series as an Example of Intertextuality in the Fine Arts,” 109–39. 123 Amy Poster, Along the Tokaido: Twelve Views by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1977), 5. 124 See Roger Keyes, “Hiroshige’s Tōkaidō Prints,” in Tōkaidō: On the Road: Pilgrimage, Travel, and Culture. Stephen Addiss, ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas and Spencer Museum of Art, 1982). 47–66. 125 See Poster for a study of Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s series, Tōkaidō gojusan eki (sanshuku) meisho (Famous views of the 53 stations of the Tōkaidō). 126 For the full series of both the Hoeido and Reisho editions see mounted by Allen Hockley, based on the collections of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. 127 John Clark, Japanese Exchanges, 7–14. Charles Wirgman (1831–1891) was probably a talented amateur rather than a professionally trained painter. He was fluent in English, French, and German; knew Chinese, Latin, and Greek; could write in Spanish and Portuguese, and had interpreter-level competence in Japanese. He went to China in 1857 as an illustrator for the Illustrated London News. Wirgman arrived in Japan in 1863, remaining until his death in 1891. He formed friendships with British merchants in Asia, Robert Jardine of the house of Jardine Matheson; Edward Clark of Dent and Co.; and A. Barnard (or Bernard) of Sassoon and Co., who set up shop in Japan in the early 1860s. In addition to his work as “Special Artist and Correspondent” for the Illustrated London News, (also Régamey’s employer in England in 1870–1871), Wirgman sold watercolors and photographs

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris in partnership with Felice Beato. In August 1876, Wirgman accompanied Guimet and Régamey to Enoshima and Kamakura. Possibly it was he who introduced the Frenchmen to Kiōsai. Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road, 197, notes that Wirgman traveled the Tōkaidō road on foot from Nagasaki to Edo in 1861, when he first arrived in Japan. He took to the road again in 1872, from Tokyo to Kyoto. He published a series of pen and ink drawings in Artistic and Gastronomic Rambles in Japan from Kioto to Tokyo by Tōkaidō based on his second excursion. 128 Guimet, Promenades japonaises (1878), 161. 129 Ibid., “Parmi les hommes de peine qui s’arrêtent pour donner leur avis, il y en a qui sont tout nus et qui ont le dos et la poitrine ornés de tatouages artistiques.” 130 Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1:82. 131 Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 19, writes that the Tokyo police arrested 2,091 people for nudity in 1876. Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 49, shows that the law against public nudity among laborers was to avoid foreign disdain. Guimet noted in Promenades japonaises (1878), 181, that tattoos were forbidden in contemporary Japan. In Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 220, he noted that complaints from English tourists led the mayor of a town to demand greater cover when the jinrikis entered his village. 132 For a discussion of the polysemic meanings and functions of tattoos in nineteenth-century Japan, see Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 142–58. For a synthetic study of tattoos in the Japanese tradition, see W.R. van Gulik, Irezumi: The Pattern of Dermatology in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1982). From a different perspective, Caroline Arscott examines the reception of Maori and Western tattooes in Victorian Britain in William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 138–49, 158–75. For one of many studies by anthropologists of Oceanic practices of body ornamentation, see Dirk H.R. Spennemann, Marshallese Tattoos (Majuro Atoll: Republic of the Marshall Islands Historic Preservation Office, 1992). 133 Fraser, “Images of Uncertainty,” makes a similar argument about the inaccessibility of local forms to Delacroix, evident in his quest for authentic details through a “stuttering, painstaking process of notation” in the North African sketchbooks. She further interprets the oblique angles in his drawings of buildings, and especially thresholds, as signs of European exclusion from the Arab world. 134 Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 111. 135 Hübner, Ramble Round the World, 241. 136 Susan Hiner, Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 145–77. 137 Aguiar, Tracking Modernity, 18–19. 138 Clark, The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, 79–146. 139 I thank Melissa Hyde for helping me to think through this issue. 140 Régamey’s illustration in Promenades japonaises: Tokio-Nikko (1880), 233. 141 See Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Also Gordon, Modern History of Japan. 142 The first was the revised Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Great Britain, signed in July 1894 in the early days of the Sino-Japanese War. 143 Ericson, Sound of the Whistle, 4, 26.

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4 Equivalence and Inversion: France, Japan, and China in Goncourt’s Cabinet

The collection of Japanese and Chinese art objects alongside eighteenth-century European works formed by Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) has implications well beyond aesthetics in the nineteenth century.1 Like Cernuschi, Goncourt created a “bivalence” between Asian and European arts, two components that functioned in dialectic relation. The set of correspondences between East and West that Goncourt elaborated through his art objects troubled rather than upheld contemporary European, and particularly French, notions of progress. This chapter considers the web of historical change, private practice, collections, and the methods of analysis with which to examine them. Behind every collection of Chinese porcelains or Japanese prints stood an individual forming a set of social identities; Goncourt did so in the nineteenth century by way of reimagining the eighteenth, importantly juxtaposing Western and non-Western materials to articulate a vision of his native France. Through the unlikely materials of porcelain and lacquer, he challenged contemporary notions of Western superiority over the non-West in military, political, and economic spheres, and he did so at a crucial turning point when the means by which individuals acquired exotic objects and whether they chose to donate them to the public stood on the fault line of 1870–1871 in modern French history. Edmond, the older of two brothers, will be the focus of attention. Although Jules de Goncourt (1830–1870) took part in the formation of their important eighteenthcentury French collection and the beginnings of their Asian cabinet, Edmond always played a greater role. Moreover, the latter survived Jules by 26 years, during which he expanded and altered the collection. I will highlight the symbolic value of Edmond’s display and representation of their collection. I argue that three elements in particular— the library of sales catalogues of ancien régime collectors, the ensemble of Chinese and Japanese objets d’art, and a rare etching of Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, ca.1717—played exceptional signifying roles. My approach is an historical one: I will introduce primary materials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the study of his compilation of sales catalogues, thus far overlooked in Goncourt studies. 111

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This set of documents, in conjunction with others, sheds light on the supply and demand for Asian objects in pre-revolutionary France. The very act of buying such items from distant lands had particular significations in the ancien régime that resonated in the nineteenth century. In brief, Asian collections did socio-political work. My discussion will show what was at stake in collecting Asian objects in modern France. That Edmond de Goncourt emphasized aesthetic affinities between European and Asian art has been acknowledged since the late nineteenth century. I argue, however, that in those equivalences were symbolic inversions of Western domination of the East. In keeping with the interdisciplinary approach of this book and given the importance of the Goncourt brothers in the French literary canon, this chapter also engages with literary criticism. I go beyond its disciplinary parameters, however, to examine vital yet overlooked components of Edmond’s undertaking. A critical reading of his singleauthored book, La Maison d’un artiste, of 1881, in conjunction with the arrangement of objects in his house will show the extent to which certain practices were political acts.2 La Maison d’un artiste and the multi-volume Journal covering the period between 1851 and 1896 articulate his conception of both art and history. The weave of autobiographic account, dissertations on European and Asian arts, catalogue, and guided tour in La Maison elucidate both an ideal and a practice of collecting that must be read against the grain. Edmond’s exegesis in both word and image creates what I term a polymorphic narrative, one that moves constantly between the objects and their manifold written and visual representations that will be analyzed below. In general, the study of any collector begs overarching questions that go beyond inquiries in literature, modern artistic and material cultures. For the philosopher Stanley Cavell, the more fundamental question is, “Why do we put ourselves together with just these things to make a world?”3 For historians such as Krzysztof Pomian and Stephen Bann, not only human need but epistemology also underpin all collections.4 The same issues have been examined in different terms. My purpose is not a reiteration of all existing theories of collecting, broadly identified as a form of human life and a universal social practice that variously serves cultural-political and socio-symbolic functions, or a matter of psychic structures of desire and subject formation.5 Nor do I wish to resolve the tensions between them. Goncourt’s own account made references to collecting in explicitly affective and sexual terms as a “passion.” He asserted early in La Maison, “For our generation bricabracomanie is merely a stop-gap for the fact that women no longer haunt the male imagination, and I have observed this in myself when, by chance, my heart is occupied, and the objet d’art becomes insignificant.”6 Elsewhere, the author linked collecting and writing in plainly sexist metaphors. “Literature is my saintly mistress, bibelots are my whore: the former will never suffer in order to keep the latter.”7 These statements cannot be taken at face value. My goal is exactly not to ascribe collecting to a psychosexual economy. However, certain psychoanalytic ideas will be examined below to highlight a key aspect of Goncourt’s project in my argument. To state it again, collecting Asian art was an intercultural contact that destabilized valorizations of France, Japan, and China in the modern era, as was the case for Cernuschi and Guimet. Or, put another way, the cracks that postcolonial theorists have long interpreted in the dominant discourse are also in the china cabinet. 112

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Collection and Dissolution In light of the sheer quantity of the Goncourt collection, only a note by category rather than a full enumeration will be given here. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt together acquired hundreds of drawings by Watteau, Boucher, Cochin, Chardin, Natoire, Fragonard, Greuze, Oudry, among many others broadly known as Rococo artists, in addition to sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts from the eighteenth century in their collection. They decided to collect works on paper rather than paintings, preferring to devote their limited funds to first rate drawings instead of minor canvases.8 It proved a wise choice. By 1857, the siblings had 196 works on paper, the great majority by eighteenth-century French artists, a smaller number by Italian and Dutch predecessors.9 New purchases made jointly between 1857 and 1870 raised the total to 716 works on paper, again mostly French. Books and documents (unpublished records of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1745 and 1748, for example) recreated the Goncourts’ vision of the ancien régime. Although the brothers were not first in the nineteenth-century revival of eighteenth-century art, as they had claimed, they indeed made an important contribution to rehabilitating eighteenth-century art and culture.10 It was achieved to a large degree through their numerous historical monographs— Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution et pendant le Directoire (1854); Portraits intimes du XVIIIe siècle: Études nouvelles d’après les lettres autographes et les documents inédits (1857, 1858); Histoire de Marie-Antoinette (1858); L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (1859–1875); Les Maîtresses de Louis XV (1860); La Femme au dix-huitième siècle (1862). In addition to their eighteenth-century objects, a massive library was part of the collection. Here were rare first editions by Marivaux, Rétif de la Bretonne, Marmontel, and scores of others. There were also volumes of classics such as La Nouvelle Héloïse and Manon Lescaut, illustrated by Boucher, Gravelot, and Eisen, as well as biographies of major eighteenth-century artists.11 In the Asian department, the brothers claimed to have recognized the value of Japanese art before others.12 Edmond made significant changes to the collection after Jules died, reducing the French section and greatly expanding the Asian one after 1870. Chinese and Japanese porcelain, lacquer, paintings, embroidery, and textiles; Japanese sword guards; miniature sculptures (netsuke) in stone, wood, and ivory; fans; and Asian bronzes filled his cabinets. As the dealer Siegfried Bing observed, in the same way that Edmond de Goncourt rejected the austerity of French neoclassicism for more playful forms, he chose the “belles époques” of Japan.13 He published two volumes, one on Utamaro in 1891 and on Hokusai in 1896, with help from the dealer Hayashi Tadamasa.14 In 1868, the brothers moved from their apartment in Paris to a secluded house at 53 Boulevard Montmorency, in Auteuil, the ostensible subject of La Maison. From 1885 onward, Edmond opened his house and collection to a group of writers and artists in the so-called Grenier (attic), in the bedroom in which Jules died of syphilis.15 It is important to note that the Goncourt collection did not survive as an entity. His choice to sell everything at a posthumous auction was in large part a gesture against official, public institutions both literary and artistic. There are two interrelated positions here. The brothers rejected the museum as a satisfactory destination for art in the same 113

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way that they rebuffed orthodoxies of nineteenth-century art. They equally rejected the venerable Académie française, founded in 1647. As early as 1867, the Goncourts had the idea of creating their own literary society that would be uncontaminated by the official Académie.16 There were many predecessors from the mid-seventeenth century onward who condemned this pantheon of alleged immortals. Voltaire parodied its inane rituals; others protested its stultifying effect on literature.17 While the Académie Goncourt was to support new writing, it was above all to perpetuate the legacy of its founders through stipends and an annual prize financed by Edmond’s posthumous auction and literary royalties.18 The alternative society in turn became part of the establishment. The Prix Goncourt is today the most publicized and prestigious literary award in France. Thus, the brothers succeeded: their writings remain the subject of literary study, and their eponymous annual prize keeps their name visible in a broader realm. It is coherent with their identity as writers that Edmond, having destroyed the referent of their collection, should leave a text—La Maison d’un artiste—as sign of their creation. Hence this hybrid text has been the worthy object of scholarly attention. Goncourt made careful preparations for his legacy.19 He composed descriptions of his objects and library in La Maison as ready entries for the eventual sale catalogue, thereby giving another function to the polyvalent text of autobiography, exposition, and inventory.20 He named allies whose expertise would secure the highest bids for his collection. Alidor Delzant (1848–1905), author of a laudatory book on the Goncourt brothers in 1889, was to promote his library.21 Roger Marx (writer and future editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts) and the artist Félix Bracquemond were to promote the collection of French art.22 The dealer Siegfried Bing was designated to write Goncourt’s Asian catalogue.23 Edmond also considered potential trustees who would best uphold his legacy. Members of his Grenier such as Flaubert, Zola, and Alphonse Daudet were among the candidates.24 The auction lasted several weeks in 1897, and the total number of lots included six hundred French drawings and prints and 1,697 Asian articles. The latter comprised 168 prints, 200 Japanese and 163 Chinese ceramics, 145 books and albums, 150 sword guards, 100 metal objects, 100 netsuke, and 673 varia. Edmond was remarkably astute in his calculations. He estimated his collection at over one million francs; the auction brought in almost 1.3 million (the equivalent of a little more than 4 million euros in 2003).25 He estimated an annual budget of 65,000 francs for his Académie; future returns and posthumous royalties produced exactly that amount. He lived up to his promise that literature, his “saintly mistress,” would always take precedence over bibelots. The coextension of collecting and writing thus endured beyond his death: he had paid for their cherished objects with his literary royalties; objects in turn financed new literature. Literary Scholarship on Goncourt The Goncourt collection has key links to their work as novelists and playwrights. I will leave aside the issue of distinguishing the pen of Edmond from Jules, a problem that arose as early as 1868, when Zola stated that the collaborative œuvre and their twinned 114

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personalities could not be separated.26 In brief, their joint novels of the 1860s, Germinie Lacerteux (1864) and Manette Salomon (1867), said to be Realist and Naturalist, focused on the lives of working-class women.27 The eponymous Lacerteux is based on Rose Malingre, the servant who stole from the authors for years to finance a secret life of depravity, discovered only after her death. Manette Salomon depicted the world of artists in which the protagonist, a painter named Naz de Coriolis, was slowly domesticated, hence ruined by his working class model turned mistress, Manette Salomon.28 Edmond himself would remark on the marriage between their writing and collecting: a material example, royalties from what he called a “dark realist novel,” Germinie Lacerteux, paid for a rococo mythology by Natoire.29 Collecting and writing were contiguous in other ways. An arrangement of objects is a restaging of a certain world. Dominique Pety has argued that collecting as a cultural practice became a textual one for the Goncourt brothers. The colors of art objects distilled in writing formed a new poetics.30 Similarly, the critic Richard Grant earlier examined the invention of words in Goncourts’ work (“arcencielé,” “rainbowy,” from arc-en-ciel, rainbow, for instance) and the transformation of French syntax in their use of colors in nominal, verbial, and adverbial forms.31 In Edmond’s lifetime, the critic Paul Bourget emphasized the brothers’ painterly approach to writing as the result of their first essays in watercolor. This initial practice of visual representation led to their writing on artists such as Watteau and Boucher, among others; the profusion of art objects saturating their home helped them to develop “a special way of seeing,” according to Bourget.32 A further correlation between literature and art, between Edmond’s writing and collecting has been identified in his move away from Naturalism to a fin-de-siècle Decadence in his solo novels of the 1880s.33 The quest for the recherché that typifies the latter is matched and materialized by his unending rearrangement of collected objects. The scholarly attention to poetic effects is important, but the role of Asian objects in turning a mere list of colors to a quasi prose poem has not been sufficiently noted thus far. We find this phenomenon most acutely in Edmond’s writing on Asian art. Regarding the tonalities found in Japanese paintings, for example, he evoked the shade of a fawn’s underbelly as “ventre de biche,” “sunsets the color of a pigeon breast followed by pearl-gray nights,” or the silvery white on the underside of a fish, “blanc ventre de poisson (blanc d’argent).”34 There is a celebration of color at the expense of an object’s shape and motif, but these metaphors had yet another function. The reverence for Asian porcelain was a way to honor the French emulations made at Sèvres, the national workshop begun in 1756.35 Edmond’s formalist exaltation of one was also his lament for another. A New Historicist approach to literature shows the impact of the turn in anthropology to the social life of things, including the class and gender relations intrinsic to material culture.36 In Janell Watson’s argument, the profusion of commodities in the nineteenth century also impinged on writing: novelists ranging from Balzac to Goncourt and Proust increasingly attended to objects in their texts.37 The delineation of inanimate things began to replace narration; enumeration, or simple inventory, encroached on plot and character. And the very abundance of objects and the popularization of collecting led to a certain withdrawal from society. The Goncourt brothers, Joris-Karl Huysmans, 115

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Robert de Montesquiou, Proust’s fictional Swann, and earlier, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, to name the best known, retreated to their bibelot-filled interiors.38 In Debora Silverman’s view, this retreat was shaped by the post-1848 disillusionment of a generation who hoped to unite artistic ideals, political action, and shared social values, an argument difficult to sustain, however, when the Goncourts were known to be entrenched reactionaries.39 Theory and Practice: A Collection Within a Collection To understand a fundamental aspect of the Goncourt collection, we must examine one component neglected in the literature. Within the renowned library of French works was a large set of eighteenth-century auction catalogues (catalogues de vente). Not a single important collector was lacking: Pierre Crozat, Quentin de Lorangère, Antoine de La Roque, Jean de Julienne, Lalive de Jully, Jean-Pierre Mariette, Randon de Boisset, among scores of others in the milieu of artists, patrons, dealers, and amateurs-honoraires of the Académie royale.40 Represented in this archive were enthusiasts of the highest rank, such as the duc de Richelieu, Peer and First Marshal of France, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis XV, and the duc d’Aumont, who owned items once in the hands of the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), son of Louis XIV.41 Significance had an inverse relation to price. Bought for pennies, and occupying no more than a fraction of a bookshelf, these materials effectively documented prenineteenth-century supply and demand.42 The ensemble was a dictionary like those of Louis Clément de Ris (Les Amateurs d’autrefois, 1877), Jules Dumesnil (Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs français, 1858), and Edmond Bonnaffé (Dictionnaire des amateurs français au XVIIe siècle, 1884), standard references still reprinted in the twentieth century.43 There was a documentary motive on the Goncourts’ part, to be sure, but also an implicit identification with the most prestigious figures before the revolution. In La Maison, Edmond said of Angran, vicomte de Fonspertuis, that his were “the rarest porcelains of China and Japan, the collection to which art lovers turned to study the real and the beautiful.” The words came from Edme-François Gersaint, the well-known dealer who produced Angran’s catalogue in 1747.44 Goncourt owned the corresponding document for Jean Louis Gaignat, former Secretary of the Cabinet du Roy, who had Chinese and Japanese porcelain that earlier belonged to Madame la duchesse d’Orléans, the Comtesse de Verrue, the Prince de Carignan, and the Comte de Fontenai, “the most knowledgeable connoisseur of porcelain.”45 The thicket of names and their entwined relations is exactly the point. These grandees became ancestors by affiliation. Goncourt had reason to identify with Antoine de La Roque, a fellow writer, editor of the Mercure de France, and great enthusiast of paintings, who created with limited means, according to Gersaint, a superior collection of both Eastern and European art.46 Moreover, La Roque was a friend of Watteau, whom the brothers exalted. Along the same lines, Edmond would prepare for his auction in advance. He appointed the dealer Siegfried Bing, the Gersaint of the late nineteenth century, to replicate the fusion of biographical sketches, information and valorization of the objects in the sales catalogue.47 116

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Edme-François Gersaint is familiar to us through Watteau’s famous Enseigne and the trade card made by Boucher in 1738, and to a lesser degree, via the many catalogues raisonnés he wrote of the major collections of the day. A dealer of European art and objects, he turned to Asian objects in the 1730s. He changed the name of his shop from Au Grand Monarque to À la Pagode (hence Boucher’s design in 1738). He was first among his colleagues to go to Holland for his supplies, making a dozen trips to buy directly from the Dutch East India Company.48 Thousands of Chinese porcelains, Asian lacquers as well as the French imitation called “vernis Martin” were in his stock, passing from one owner to another. Gersaint was at the hub of the world of collectors and merchants in Paris, attracting clients among the aristocrats of Europe, and leading Parisian dealers (Agard, Babault, Glomy, Hébert, Hecquet, Huguier, Joullain, Julliot, La Hoguette, La Porte, Lempereur, Mariette, Mortain, Nourry, Odieuvre, and Rémy).49 That Gersaint was the most active bidder at the very auctions that he organized from 1733 to 1749, including three of the most important—the posthumous sales of Quentin de Lorangère, La Roque, and Angran de Fonspertuis—suggests the entwinement of social and financial interests in this world.50 Value long resided in many realms in the exchange of commodities—the material, its rarity and aesthetic merit, the mechanisms of their circulation, and their owners. The prestigious roster guaranteed the merit of transactions; the collected objects in turn endorsed the new owners. In this manner, a group formed the canon of pre-revolutionary collectors in which Gersaint tried to establish himself as a scholar and gentleman.51 Goncourt thus found two models. Like the owners, he had both European representations and a variety of Asian objects. Like the dealers, he wrote informatively about them.52 In addition to the roll call, the library provided evidence of what had been bought and sold. A significant homogeny is revealed: all collections had Asian vessels in porcelain of various forms (jatte, urne, vase, aiguière, buire, lisbet, rouleau) and small statues (magots) or articulated figures (pagodes). Some porcelains were adapted to European services for tea, coffee and chocolate, as shown by the image below of an item not from the Goncourt collection, used here for purposes of illustration [Fig. 4.1]. Also omnipresent was lacquer from Japan and China as part of French collections of diverse European objects. Gersaint’s many catalogues feature a standard organization of “Bijoux, Porcelaines, Bronzes, Ouvrages de Lacq & Roche & de Porcelaine, Pendules de goût & autres Meubles curieux & composés, Tableaux, Dessins, Estampes, Coquilles, Autres Effets ….”53 In this business of luxury imports, we know that Duvaux and Gersaint, licensed marchands-merciers (one of six merchant corporations of Paris in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries allowed to practice certain trades), relied on the various East Indies companies, and above all, the Dutch East Indies Company, for stock.54 Gersaint and his colleagues often had Asian porcelains turned into European objects.55 In such transformations, the use of unrelated parts from various originals was common. The new creations would rise several times in value and at times the intricate Rococo style mounts of gilt bronze (or moulu) cost buyers more than the porcelain itself.56 The same was true of lacquer: cabinet-makers regularly excised panels from Japanese and Chinese furniture to veneer new, European works. And so it continued in the late nineteenth century: Goncourt’s acquaintance and dealer, Philippe Sichel, boasted that 117

4.1  Chinese lidded vase in Imari style, underglaze blue, overglaze iron red and gold, transformed as coffee or chocolate urn, ca.1710–1730

Equivalence and Inversion

4.2  Bernard II Vanrisamburgh, commode veneered with panels of Japanese lacquer, the borders japanned, with gilt-bronze mounts and a griotte d’Italie marble slab, 1750–1760

the lacquered chest he acquired on a trip to Japan in 1882 was disassembled in Paris and sold to 20 collectors.57 In the eighteenth century, Gersaint and company employed the best bronze workers and cabinet-makers—Martin Carlin, Joseph Baumhauer, Roger van der Cruse (or van der Lacroix), Bernard II Vanrisamburgh (B.V.R.B. II), Mathieu Criard, and André-Charles Boulle for such work58 [Fig. 4.2]. Goncourt’s library of catalogues effectively documents the fad for lacquer and porcelain. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s maîtresse en titre, had some three hundred vases, two or three of which figured in her portraits by Boucher and Quentin de la Tour.59 Her purchases were recorded in the daybook of Lazare Duvaux, marchand bijoutier ordinaire du roi, and owner of the shop Au Chagrin de Turquie in Paris. She also had lacquer objects and furniture, the most expensive of Duvaux’s merchandise. Edmond used his copy of Duvaux’s daybook to compile her purchases.60 He drew attention to four Chinese celadon vases that she once owned in his bedroom.61 Like his ancien régime forerunners, he also had small lacquer objects such as writing cases, of which two were reproduced in his own sales catalogue62 [Fig. 4.3]. Goncourt’s set of little booklets thus had multiple functions. The names represented a virtual family tree: the enumerated objects, a model, and a meta-collection. The library 119

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

4.3  Écritoire de Korin, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient, 1897, item number 422, plate 4

offered a miniature in words of his entire project. He knew well that noble collectors in the eighteenth century had both European and Asian materials. Their catalogues taught him the ancien régime conventions of writing an inventory. Gersaint and his fellow merchants (Lebrun, Mariette, Pierre Rémy, Philippe Poirier) began each entry in the same way, using the lexicon of “bouteilles” (vase), “rouleaux” (tall cydrindrical vase), “potiche” (vase), “pagode” (an articulated figure), and “craquelé” (veined porcelain).63 One among countless examples is item 223 in Mariette’s catalogue of Crozat’s sale in 1750 that listed “Deux grands Roulleaux de Porcelaine ancienne, bleu et blanc.”64 In La Maison, Goncourt also began with a simple identification of “Potiche [vase]. Fond blanc, le col entouré d’une large bordure .…”65 It is significant that his biological family appeared in the very same chapter. Among those mentioned were his grandmother, Madame Le Bas de Courmont, at her height, a beautiful woman portrayed by Isabey.66 On the other side of the family was his paternal grandfather, Jean-Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1753–1829). In Edmond’s journal, he referred to his uncle Armand Lebas de Courmont (1786–1832), Chevalier de l’Empire, Captain of the hussars and sometime collector of chinoiserie. An early childhood memory had Armand at Edmond’s bedside when the boy’s bout of whooping cough was mistaken for tuberculosis. He emerged from the alleged near-fatality with a special bond, one that had implications for his collecting in adult life: “perhaps there is in my taste for japonaiserie the influence of an uncle, uncle Armand, my mother’s favorite brother.”67 He also underlined other influences—his mother and aunt who initiated him into the antique shops of Paris, making him, he asserted in La Maison, “the bibeloteur that I was, that I am, and that I shall be all my life.”68 Goncourt thus constructed a lost world, including an aristocratic pedigree to which Guimet and Cernuschi had no purchase.69 By insisting on his manifold relationship to this earlier milieu—by 120

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protesting too much—the writer showed his self-importance and his insecurity, to be sure, but also a conception of collecting as an exclusive practice. This accent on affinities both inherited and elective reveals other dimensions of a broader history. In effect, the author pointed to social tensions between traditionalist aristocrats and a bourgeoisie of mercantile and industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Goncourt, from a family only recently ennobled, hence part of a new rather than the old aristocracy of the blood or of the robe, showed an anxiety of association with bourgeois collectors, whom he condemned as a faceless group.70 There was yet another model of collecting that intervened in aesthetic and cultural politics, a certain generation said to have initiated a “patriotic taste.”71 Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully (1725–1779), descendent of an old military nobility, first spoke of “le goût patriotique” when he encouraged French novices in the Académie Royale through early commissions. La Live championed Greuze, collected works by the mature Chardin and Oudry, and put contemporary art in his much admired survey of French painting and sculpture.72 Abbé Joseph-Marie Terray (1718–1778), Louis-Gabriel, Marquis de Véri (1722–1785), and Laurent Grimod de La Reynière (1734–1793) had a similar disposition. Aristocratic or non-noble, each supported modern French art in the ancien régime while adhering to the normative regard for older Dutch and Flemish works. These collectors were duly represented in Goncourt’s library by their sales catalogues. The latter praised La Live for gathering “the most beautiful examples of French art from Simon Vouet to Vien.”73 Goncourt’s ensemble was no match for their grand canvases and marbles, but by valorizing French art of the ancien régime at a time when, in his estimation, it was neglected in France, he too showed a patriotic taste. The Market for Asian Objects The insistence on genealogy in La Maison and in the Journal illuminates still another facet of collecting in modern France. Read along with other sources, Goncourt’s work tells us about the changing market and its various players. In the author’s lifetime, Asian imports to Europe broadened in character. The first documented collection of Japanese prints, drawings, paintings, and manuscripts (as opposed to decorative arts or “curiosities”) to be sold in France belonged to Isaac Titsingh, head of the Dutch East Indies community at Nagasaki from 1780 to 1783. After his death, Titsingh’s holdings entered the French market in 1812, 1814, 1820, and 1840.74 In the first half of the nineteenth century, such articles were available to public view in England, France, Sweden and the Netherlands.75 Decorative arts, porcelain, and textiles maintained their appeal, while new items, especially Japanese prints, along with Chinese paintings and calligraphy, were introduced. The new category of objects remained far less available than the decorative arts. Furthermore, given the already high status and price of Hokusai’s work in Japan, the proverbial discovery of prints used to wrap shipments of porcelain (first claimed by Félix Braquemond in 1858) is no longer credible.76 121

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La Maison and the Journal describe this changing world and its personae dramatis.77 One of the names most cited by Goncourt and also by scholars of European access to Asian objects is Madame Desoye, who opened La Jonque Chinoise with her husband in the early 1860s at 220 rue de Rivoli. Goncourt’s first recorded purchase of Japanese prints came from her shop in June 1861. He was among her most devoted clients, along with Baudelaire, Manet, Monet, Moreau, and Whistler.78 Other establishments included La Porte Chinoise, at 36 rue Vivienne, and À L’Empire Chinois, at number 56, on the same street. In the nineteenth-century business directory, Didot Bottin, a new rubric of “Chinoiseries et Japoneries” appeared. Five Parisian venues were named in 1869; 36 in this category a decade later.79 Goncourt did not mention vendors of tea who also carried Chinese porcelains, lacquers, and other “curiosities”. Such was the case of a shop, at 15 Galerie Feydeau near rue Vivienne and the passage des Panoramas; Duvauchel’s boutiques, 34 rue de l’Université and 34 rue de Beaune; À la Pagode, 285 rue Saint-Honoré and 46 rue des Petits-Champs, Grondart, 1 rue de l’Odéon et rue Monsieur le Prince on the Left Bank.80 Purveyors such as Mary Beretta, 12 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin; Brissonnet, 22 rue Rambuteau; Alphone Chanton, first 22 rue Vivienne, then 18 rue du Quatre Septembre; Cousie et Cie, 10 boulevard Malesherbes, imported directly from sources in Japan and China.81 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Guérin operated at 12 rue d’Uzès and 174 rue Montmartre. Madame Langweil had a little place on the Boulevard des Italiens, and Charles Vignier, a writer and enthusiast of Chinese porcelains, first had a curiosity shop on rue Laffitte, and later moved to bigger quarters on rue Lamennais.82 Indeed, as indicated in the Didot Bottin, one could find Asian collectables in dozens of establishments dotted around the capital. The only Japanese dealers were Wakai Kenzaburō and his young assistant Hayashi Tadamasa, who arrived in Paris in 1876. The Kiryū Kōshō Kaisha, variously translated as the First Japanese Company for Commerce, or Kiryū Crafts and Trading Company, was dissolved in 1891.83 Hayashi opened his own boutique on the rue d’Hauteville, where he received Goncourt and other japonisants. In the early 1890s, he moved to 65 rue de la Victoire.84 Hayashi’s biggest rival was Siegfried Bing, who became the foremost dealer of Asian objets d’art across the continent. His gallery remained for many years at the same address, 19 rue Chauchat, adjoining 22 rue de Provence. It was a family business, first helped by his brother-in-law, Michael Martin Baer, German consul to Tokyo from 1870 to 1874, and from 1877 to 1881, who acted as intermediary in Japan.85 Siegfried’s brother, Auguste, and his son, Marcel, traveled to Japan to supply the shop in Paris. Their clients were not only individuals but also institutions: the South Kensington Museum bought Japanese bronzes and ceramics from Bing in 1875.86 Goncourt attributed the credit (or blame) to him for the popularity of Asian objects. “Almost all the art of China and Japan will have passed through Bing’s hands.”87 His colleagues Auguste Sichel and his son Philippe also had a shop at 11 rue Pigalle, in an area populated by art and antique dealers.88 On more than one occasion, Goncourt wrote in his diary, “nous partons japoniser chez Bing et Sichel.”89 122

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As Edmond de Goncourt’s archives show, his quarry was in Paris rather than Japan or China. Receipts survive from Bing, De La Narde, Hayashi, and Wakai among his papers, and their names punctuate his journal. A letter from Madame Desoye remains in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.90 In addition, our protagonist bought items directly from Asian delegates, as in the Chinese jade vase sold by Tien-Pao after the Exposition Universelle in 1867.91 Another venue was the auction house, as indicated by advertisements in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité.92 The collection of the art critic Philippe Burty (1830–1890) was thus sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1891.93 Less discerning shoppers rather than collectors could go to the department store Au Bon Marché, where mediocre export ware from Japan and China was available after the early 1880s. Zola made the emporium the subject of his novel Au bonheur des dames, describing at length the profusion of bric-à-brac on offer. Goncourt’s writings indicate not only a changing market but also its changing social order. In the 1830s, Edmond alone frequented the old Place du Carrousel for its “gaping, half-opened portfolios on the doorstep of its hundreds of shops” and European drawings on the sidewalk, arrayed next to tools and bits of metal. He claimed to have made his first purchase, a watercolor by François Boucher, from one of the shops later razed.94 So haphazard were the conditions, he recalled, that “a vendor of savage arrows and Indian heads” sold him a Watteau.95 The brothers also attended the auction house, where Georges de la Tour drawings could be had for five or six francs a piece in the 1850s.96 These conditions were long gone by the time Edmond wrote La Maison. Moreover, the many characters he fondly described, old Guichardot, whose rustic lair was packed to the roof with European drawings and woodlouse, the kindly père Blaisot, “the dean of prints,” had been replaced by a new breed.97 At a higher orbit in the eighteenth century, Gersaint, Duvaux, and their colleagues served their illustrious clients. In the nineteenth century, the relationship was reversed. This new world had a prominent member, the already named Auguste Sichel, from a Jewish mercantile family, who turned to Chinese and Japanese objects in the mid-1870s. Related to the Rothschilds, one of the Sichel women married Bing’s nephew in 1859, thus consolidating dynastic power in commerce.98 Auguste’s son Philippe also entered the trade in Asian art. Goncourt complained as he dined at Sichel’s table, attended by white-gloved employees, that peddlers of scrap metal had been replaced by “gentlemen dressed by our tailors, buying and reading books, and marrying women as elegant as the ladies of our society .…”99 Here his notorious antiSemitism as much as class prejudice were evident. He pointed to the transformation of Sichel’s residence, frequented by “la finance juive,” to a place of elegant assignation.100 A certain Madame La Cahen d’Anvers, pretending to examine a Japanese lacquer, informed her young lover of their next tryst.101 The latter was Charles Ephrussi, an avid collector of netsuke. Desoye’s shop had a similar function. Goncourt’s various comments inform us of the changing social landscape in which he collected both Rococo and Asian arts over the decades. Dealers, in his view, had become sultans who dispensed favors at their discretion. Goncourt’s rich rivals, Cernuschi, the Rothschilds, and the Camondos, enjoyed privileged access to the best merchandise, but in general, clients were supplicants.102 Along with other features of contemporary life that he abhorred was this social world apparently turned upside down. 123

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Functions of Chinoiserie The uses of collections in social climbing have always existed, but in the modern history of France collectable Asian objects played a special role.103 The term chinoiserie in the eighteenth century denoted not only creations from China, but also Japan, India, and the whole region of East and Southeast Asia then referred to as “des Indes.” In this traffic, the Dutch East Indies Company prevailed. We need to recall an earlier history of selling Asian decorative arts in Paris since the late seventeenth century to see the prior formation and growth of this commerce. Several vendors of “Lachinage” appeared in Abraham du Pradel’s 1692 almanach of commerce.104 A certain Dorigny, on the rue Quinquempoix, a Monsieur Laitier, and Mademoiselle Le Brun had in stock “beautiful pieces of china and Lachinage.” Monsieur du Cauroy sold Asian porcelains, ceramic figures, and furniture on the rue Briboucher, while Monsieur Langlois and his eldest son “imitated and repaired to perfection Chinese furniture” on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the area of Paris occupied by cabinet makers. A few decades later, respected eighteenth-century collectors had a hand in sociability, identity, and knowledge production. Gersaint advised his clients that antique lacquer from Japan was far superior to the Chinese version. Its beauty and rarity, he noted, made it almost unaffordable.105 Regarding the collection of Angran, Vicomte de Fonspertuis, Gersaint wrote that true connoisseurs sought only the antique lacquer of Japan.106 Whether the real thing or a Rococo interpretation, chinoiserie was employed by some in pre-revolutionary society for upward mobility. Katie Scott considers the case of an ennobled functionary, Joseph-Jean-Baptiste Fleuriau d’Armenonville (1661–1728). Made intendant des finances in 1705, he hoped that conjuries of China by the most able artists in his residence, the Château de La Muette, in the Bois de Boulogne, outside Paris, would help his ascension.107 He succeeded insofar as he attracted the duc and duchesse de Bourgogne to visit his cabinet chinois, designed by Watteau and Claude III Audran, for his estate filled with porcelain and lacquer in 1707.108 However, d’Armenonville’s social ambitions cost him his home. The Regent, Philippe d’Orléans, once alert to the beauty of La Muette, would replace him with his daughter, Marie Louise Elizabeth, duchesse de Berry, as its occupant.109 Watteau’s airy Chinese figures perched on light arabesques belonged to what Scott terms a Rococo “economy of delight,” but much more subtly and importantly, their playfulness belied the contemporary change from a so-called age of discovery by merchants and missionaries to an era of aggressive European colonialization.110 The regime that launched the French East Indies Company wanted an empire in the East, a Gallia orientalis.111 Louis XIV made clear his expansionism from the start. As the king’s propagandist wrote in 1664, “why should Portugal, Holland, England and Denmark have trading posts and garrisons in the East Indies while France has neither?”112 It was a violent business: the monopolistic Dutch raided French trading posts, and the English captured French ships at sea. The first Compagnie launched by Richelieu (1604) and its three reincarnations (1664, 1686, 1732) failed one after another.113 Inefficient and insolvent, the French company could not afford to arm its ships in 1700; by 1706, it stopped trading in the Indies, and two years later, it faced yet another bankruptcy.114 124

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The French venture in des Indes was consistently unprofitable and the frivolity of chinoiserie had an inverse relation to the heavy risks. As Katie Scott has argued, commerce subtended change of authority: “the cultural system of the court was gradually reorganized by the forces of capitalism” from Louis XIV onward.115 In this development, the luxury economy of exotica played a role. Chinoiserie, in other words, came at a price: the inventions of form in Watteau’s and Audran’s cabinet chinois violated artistic codes; their use for social climbing had no guarantee; business overseas risked life and fortune.116 D’Armenonville was a part of this history, moving in court circles that promoted Eastern trade and religious missions. Both he and his wife Jeanne Gilbert had poor returns on their investments in the French Compagnie des Indes.117 If chinoiserie could erode class lines and hide shifts of power in the ancien régime, Goncourt would use it to the opposite end at another pivotal moment in French history. After the disasters of 1870–1871, when the country again geared up for bellicose campaigns abroad, he emulated earlier practices. He used Asian objects not to move up, however, but rather to keep away what he always wrote in the singular, “le bourgeois,” at his heels.118 Functions of Asia Further to a marking of social boundaries, Goncourt used his collection of precious things to reimagine worlds dematerialized by time. Here, we need to attend to the range of sources that he used and also the ones he rejected to make up his version of Asia. To reinvent distant lands, he turned to missionary accounts, particularly those by Jesuits in the eighteenth century, who reported Chinese sophistication in material, if not spiritual, culture.119 On Japan, early descriptions came by way of the Dutch East Indies Company.120 Most Westerners learned about China and Japan by reading Athanasius Kircher and Engelbert Kæmpfer, respectively. Goncourt had both works in his library.121 The collector also knew the study of Chinese porcelain by Père d’Entrecolles, written in 1712 and 1722, that would form the entry in the Encyclopédie.122 On lacquerware, the curious turned to Père Le Chéron d’Incarville (1706–1757), whose texts were published in Jean-Félix Watin’s L’Art du peintre, doreur, vernisseur, in 1772.123 Goncourt’s vision corresponded to Voltaire’s view of the Chinese regime as “the best in the world,” greater than the despotic governments of Europe.124 The collector was partial to the Jesuit painter and missionary Jean-Denis Attiret’s depiction that resonated all over Europe when published in French in 1749, and in English translation in 1752. As painter to the emperor of China, Attiret made an exceptional visit to the imperial compound at Yuanming Yuan, just outside Beijing. He described its grandeur at length. “The interior is decorated and furnished with all that is most beautiful and precious in China, the Indies and Europe,” he wrote. The exterior perfectly matched the beauty inside. The artfully composed lakes, mountains, and flowers formed “a true earthly paradise.”125 Such encomium was replaced by the criticisms of merchants, sailors, and envoys in the nineteenth century, who occupied a different space of encounter.126 Those like Guimet with neither proselytic nor mercantile interests noted Japan’s modernization 125

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

and hasty rejection of traditional forms. They observed China’s ruin after two opium wars and internal revolt.127 Goncourt’s contemporaries, Duret and Cernuschi, like many commentators, were repulsed by the poverty and disorganization. “The most salient character, the dominant feature of the Chinese city is the grime,” Duret complained, “an unnameable filth, a dirtiness that simultaneously offends all the senses. The cities are cesspools.”128 Cernuschi returned with the same story. Goncourt wrote that Cernuschi spoke at length of “the putrefaction of [Chinese] cities, the sepulchral cast of the countryside, the drab sadness and miserable boredom that emanate from the whole place.”129 According to Cernuschi, “China stinks of shit and death.”130 A different version of China by Edmond and Jules was produced, surprisingly, after their grand tour to Italy in 1855. In their travel account, L’Italie d’hier, they wrote descriptive chapters on the major cities they visited. They wrote a separate, long story titled “Venise la nuit” that they qualified as “a reverie.”131 The story’s narrator had to describe China to a Venetian who expected “a paradise of paradoxes” filled with magical animals, red trees, and jade skies. The imaginary Venetian insisted that China was “a country where two and two make five …!”132 In light of Edmond’s manifold associations of chinoiserie with the world of elite ancien régime collectors, we cannot but see a certain rapport with France. There is a double transmutation from a chimerical Venice to China, and in La Maison, from China to France. In the later text, both the exaltation of and lament for Chinese art doubled for the same feelings for the French. To do so, the author drew on historical studies rather than the travel accounts of his contemporaries. He used the work of Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), who had the authority of the chair in Chinese at the Collège de France. One of Julien’s achievements was the translation, in 1856, of a seventeenth-century Chinese text on porcelain.133 Goncourt’s passage on a prized invention during the reign of Qing emperor Kangxi (康熙 1661–1722), first found in Julien, played a vital, symbolic role in Edmond’s construction.134 And where has there been a properly artistic emperor … to say, ‘henceforth the porcelains of the palace shall be the blue of the sky after rain, in the space between the clouds’? And on such an edict, where did one find a potter to invent … [this] porcelain?135

The rhetorical question also referred to Goncourt’s own culture. In both countries, the height of taste and achievement was over, he implied. Thus his vision was dystopic, in contrast to Guimet’s utopia in which even factory workers would know the world’s religions through his museum. Two opposing trends, one mourned the past, while another promoted movement forward. In each, a variety of representations of Europe and Asia was reciprocally needed. Goncourt argued that Japan had a more modern aesthetic than its Chinese predecessor, but he employed both traditions in the same way to defend his image of France.136 As Pamela Warner has noted, he used the procedures of Western art history—monographic study of a single artist’s work, biography, periodization, the analysis of form and subject—to draw out affinities in approach and form between roughly contemporaneous Japanese and French artists. Kitagawa Utamaro, whom he called “the Watteau of over there,” was the subject of a monograph.137 126

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Moreover, Goncourt’s emphasis on correspondences between the two traditions, Warner argues, was an expression of hostility to nineteenth-century academic values and particularly the institutionalized neglect of pre-revolutionary forms. The repeated pattern of viewing Japanese art through a French lens shows a nationalized reading, she states, and “in most cases, the nation most at stake was not Japan, but France.”138 China and Japan, in other words, were employed to support as well as to criticize French art as he saw it. Beyond the circle of Cernuschi, Guimet, and Goncourt, Asian art had a political function in nineteenth-century France. Jean-Paul Bouillon earlier noted that the zeal for all things Japanese was not only a refuge, but in some cases, also a subversion of dominant authority.139 The semisecret Jing-lar society, active between 1866 and 1869, held monthly dinners at which adherents enjoyed Japanese fare and wore Japanese dress. Their name was derived from the Ginglard wine they drank, now given a vaguely Japanese tone.140 The founding members, such as the writer Burty and the ceramicist M.L. Solon, were indeed avid collectors. However, the real purpose of the Jing-lar was to gather Republican sympathizers during the regime of Napoleon III.141 The embrace of an exotic foreignness was here a covert manner to reject the home grown. Conversely, foreign materials could be used to promote the Second Empire, as the art historian Greg Thomas has argued. Official exhibitions of loot from Yuanming Yuan, the palace admired by Attiret, and sacked by Franco-British forces in 1860, were predicated on “an implicit, underlying recognition of similarity … between China’s imperial culture and France’s own royal and imperial heritage.”142 The Second Empire acknowledged China as a corresponding, if unequal, imperial power. The latter’s defeat bolstered the legitimacy of Napoleon III, or so it was hoped. Goncourt made his own use of Asian objects in building an argument about France without any interest in the political expediency of the regime. At no point did he mention the booty displayed at the Palais des Tuileries and Fontainebleau, nor to ongoing campaigns abroad. His references were always to the past. Goncourt’s Polymorphic Narratives Goncourt’s house and its contents were the summa of his œuvre, but he also used many media—objects, photographs, portraits, autobiographic writings—to shape his manifold articulations. The public had access to his creation in the mediated forms of La Maison and a limited edition of photographs. The book, in effect, was a virtual tour for the reader. My examination here is not a full reconstruction of the house, nor a retelling of the 700-page text. Instead, I wish to highlight some of the ways in which the author wrote about his house and collection and their implications. A reader and notional visitor began in the foyer, in the mixed company of European and Asian objects. Goncourt treated at length the Japanese embroidery on silk (foukousa) and hanging scrolls (kakemono) in the vestibule. He emphasized their Western companions: “among these Oriental bibelots, a French marvel, a bas-relief by Clodion!”143 From the vestibule, a door led to the dining room on the right. Here, too, 127

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he was at pains to underline the cohabitation of mainly eighteenth-century decorative arts and a few Asian works. A Louis XV Aubusson tapestry, based on drawings by Leprince and Huet, dominated the walls; in the center, a dining table and eight chairs by Mazaros. He highlighted two pieces of furniture from two disparate traditions in the dining room: a rosewood table with gilt bronze and white marble, once used by his grandmother and mother; a Japanese screen ornamented on both sides with floral motifs.144 The Petit Salon, containing furniture and eighteenth-century drawings, adjoined the dining room on the main floor. In the Grand Salon, also on the ground floor, were Clodion’s terra cotta works, porcelains from Sèvres and Saxony, ancien régime furniture, and a large Japanese bronze fountain. A staircase led to the more private spaces of bedroom and study above. One began upstairs in the Cabinet de travail, where his earlier noted library was housed. Next, the small Cabinet de toilette, filled with such items as French drawings and Japanese silk paintings, European and Asian ceramics unrelated to utilitarian ablution. Eighteenth-century furniture, tapestry, French and Asian porcelain were in his bedroom. In presenting his mélange of East and West, the author evoked such forerunners as Pompadour.145 For him, it was a work of illuminating comparisons and contrasts. Hence Goncourt singled out one among many examples: a meter-high Japanese bronze fountain in the Grand Salon, in the midst of eighteenth-century French furniture and tapestry, framed drawings, Clodion’s delicate statuettes, and European porcelains. The extravagantly monstrous dragon on the Japanese fountain counterpoised all the prettiness (“ce joli”) of the eighteenth century. His careful design was to use juxtaposition to underscore the beauty of each.146 In addition to contrast, he pointed to affinities such as the play of colors in a Mayence statuette like those found in Asian porcelain.147 As we will see through certain photographs below, the collector accentuated these connections through display. Goncourt staged his many objects to create an autobiographical fiction. Slightly younger contemporaries, such as the aristocrat Montesquiou, an acquaintance, and the much traveled Pierre Loti, also used their homes to elaborate a recherché aesthetic vision.148 In contrast, Cernuschi had a straightforward display. It was exactly what Goncourt opposed: the cold, Louvre-like white walls in Cernuschi’s mansion deprived the collection of a true home in the author’s conception. “These objects from the Far East seem miserable,” he remarked of Cernuschi’s collection, formed directly in East Asia. “One might say that an evil genie transported them to a palace designed by the flamboyant and bourgeois taste of a shareholder of Le Siècle.”149 Records of Cernuschi’s own display are not available, but photographs taken immediately upon his death such as the one in Chapter 2 [Fig. 2.3] indeed showed a methodical arrangement of bronzes in rows along two sides of a wall.150 Goncourt’s polymorphic narrative contained a visual component. Two years after the publication of La Maison, the author began to work on an illustrated edition that was ultimately unrealized. The photographer Fernand Lochard made several views between 1883 and 1891.151 Freuler and Joseph Primoli also took photographs up to the year before Goncourt’s death. No records remain of the circumstances, including whether the collector commissioned Lochard and the others. If carried out, the illustrated 128

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edition would have intervened in the dissemination of his work in multiple ways. The hundreds of reproductions in “eau-forte,” “procédé,” “couleur,” and “noir” would have added visual information to the text.152 However, while connected to Goncourt’s writing, they were not accessory to it. The images had their own mise-en-scène. Furthermore, if disseminated, the photographs could have functioned as publicity for his sale in the same way that he intended passages in La Maison for his future catalogue. Lastly, the photographs provided visual traces of an ensemble, thus a documentary value, although not a simple one. The fact that Goncourt planned to give the Asian component the greatest attention—over a hundred reproductions alone for the Cabinet de l’ExtrêmeOrient, more than any other part of the collection—suggests the wish to document particular examples.153 An expository and educational rationale would have cohered with the didactic element of his writing on Asian art. His later donation of 44 photographs that he collated as Maison des Goncourt to the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée Carnavalet indicates a wish to record his work for posterity.154 The relationship between these photographs and La Maison has been the object of inquiry. Pamela Warner has convincingly analyzed them as individual works of art in the same way that Goncourt’s entire house in Auteuil was a sovereign creation.155 Most recently, Juliet Simpson has argued that the house, the book, and their images constituted proto-Symbolist works of art pivotal to the future development of Symbolist literature, visual and material cultures.156 Different from both authors, my attention turns to his use of various media, above all, his Asian objects, as vehicles to show his kinship with ancien régime collectors and to support a particular vision of France. I argue that his work revealed the unanticipated dangers of collecting Asian art. Goncourt used the latter to oppose European attitudes to art as to politics, but he was not entirely aware that his Asian prints and porcelains in effect subverted his view of French art. Photographs such as Lochard’s view of the dining room, taken in 1883 [Fig. 4.4], allow a greater apprehension of the affinities the collector emphasized between two unrelated traditions. It is to their analysis that I now turn. A corner of the dining room is dominated by a large mirror that reflects a wall and the door between the dining room and the vestibule. To the mirror’s left is the adjoining Petit Salon that duplicates the arrangement of a Japanese screen in front of a fireplace topped by the European furnishings of a mirror on a mantelpiece. In this skillfully composed and partial view of the dining room, we see the curvilinear extravagance of the tapestry that Goncourt treated at length in La Maison. What could not have been grasped through the text alone is the surfeit of ornamentation, as if a horror vacui, but one well judged: the picture shows the echoing of rectangular shapes in the vases on the mantel, the rectangular Japanese screen below, and the large mirror above. The resonance of forms demonstrates “le joli” of both French and Asian creations. The photograph makes visible the uncanny rapport between two different systems. Lochard’s view of the adjoining Petit Salon [Fig. 4.5] makes particularly clear how the photograph is a rich construction in its own right, independent of La Maison, and in some respects, a contradiction of the text. We should note that Goncourt himself mounted, labeled, and signed the photograph. To orient ourselves, the Beauvais chair 129

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4.4  Fernand Lochard, Salle à manger de la Maison des Goncourt à Auteuil, July 1883, photograph on albumen paper

that is only partially visible in Lochard’s view of the dining room is here in full view. We also see an elaborate chandelier, bronze objects, porcelains, and a cabinet beneath four framed drawings. The reflection suggests a second, small chandelier floating over a vertical row of pictures. Reading from the mirror’s right edge, we see, in fact, two framed works on the Petit Salon’s opposite wall. To their left is a second vertical row of drawings installed on the far wall of Grand Salon.157 This enfilade of rooms is compressed by both the mirror and the photographic space, as if both Goncourt and Lochard wished to orient and also confound the viewer. By collapsing the various rooms reflected in the play of mirrors and bringing everything to the surface, the image pushed the collector/ author out of the room. Goncourt invented this complex web of fine and decorative arts, to be sure, but in Lochard’s view he was displaced by his creation. The photograph belied the author’s claims of authority over the collection made variously through genealogy and personal events in his writing. The image was not subordinate to the text, nor the objects to the collector. 130

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4.5  Fernand Lochard, Petit salon de la maison d’Auteuil, July 1883, photograph on albumen paper

In contrast to Lochard’s corner of the dining room and the Petit salon we just examined, a later photograph by D. Freuler of the dining room includes the owner [Fig. 4.6]. The image gives us a larger view, encompassing the Mozaros table and other furniture, and also more evidence that collector and/or his photographers had rearranged things for the photo sessions. The two rectangular porcelain vases have been removed from the mantelpiece in Lochard’s picture to the middle of the back wall in Freuler’s view. Now they participate in a symmetrical arrangement of two statues and a plate below that is aligned to the vertical axis of the swag above.158 In the new installation the porcelain vases echo and anchor the couple frolicking in the woods. To understand further the variability of display in Goncourt’s house, and to bring to the foreground another dimension of this multilayered narrative, we can compare 131

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4.6  D. Freuler, Edmond de Goncourt dans sa salle à manger à Auteuil, 1890, photograph on albumen paper

Freuler’s photograph of 1890 to a watercolor made by Jules of their previous home in Paris, the apartment on the rue St-Georges [Fig. 4.7]. This unique visual record shows a different array of objects in the dining room. The Aubusson tapestry is there, but other components differ: porcelains and a gilded bronze medallion of Louis XV are on a stove on the far left, two framed drawings (Watteau’s Quatre études d’homme dansant, dont une pour “Indifférent” and Moreau le jeune’s Le Serment de Louis XVI) were hung above more porcelains and a statuette on a cabinet on the other side of the tapestry.159 Not only do the watercolor and Freuler’s photograph indicate that the occupants of the two abodes continually rearranged their objects, the comparison of the two images highlight another important difference. No one is pictured in the watercolor, whereas Edmond appears in Freuler’s image as the most arresting feature. Yet, his very presence in the photograph underlines an absence of life. The owner stands as the creator of this artful composition, but that is all it is. The dining table is not set and there are no chairs for potential guests. The room comes across not as a social space, but as an empty stage on which Goncourt stiffly, self-consciously poses. So it was in La Maison, where he ended the chapter on this room with a recollection of the previous one in Paris—dinners hosted with Jules at rue St-Georges with friends, 132

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4.7  Jules de Goncourt, La Salle à manger de la rue Saint-Georges, n.d. (ca.1855), pen and watercolor on paper

brightened by fine wine, food, and the grand Aubusson. In contrast, “today the dining room at Auteuil is only the dining room of an old man alone, who prefers the dining room of others.”160 His account of a former sociability is not simply nostalgia, but also one more evocation of the ancien régime circle. Another photograph by Freuler recreated a tableau in La Maison [Fig. 4.8]. It occurs in the chapter on his Cabinet de travail, in which Goncourt treated at length his Bibliothèque du XVIIIe siècle and his library of sales catalogues. As we saw earlier, he invoked the forebears who shaped his identity as collector. The author described— acted out in words—his own review of the situation in intervals between work. He sat by the chimney, he wrote, a cigarette between his lips, to reflect on all the things that surrounded him.161 Freuler’s view of 1890 replicates exactly this scene. Goncourt works at his desk in a state of absorption in the photograph. Too small to be recognizable in the row of tiny circular portraits above the mantelpiece are the grandparents he noted in La Maison. An armchair is put at an angle to the fireplace to reenact this moment of reflection. This representation also participates in, indeed feeds, a wide interest at the time in domestic life and interiority. We find evidence of this phenomenon in Henry Havard’s abundant publications on home decorating, such as L’Art dans la maison: Grammaire de l’ameublement (1884), among many examples.162 That Goncourt had become a figure of reference is indicated by Spire Blondel’s manual of 1885, L’Art intime et le goût en France: Grammaire de la curiosité, in which Blondel’s forward is a paraphrase of the preamble of La Maison.163 The public was also especially interested in cultural luminaries in their spaces of work.164 In this vein, a separate series of images featured Goncourt at home in “Les Contemporains chez eux,” ca.1890. 133

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4.8  D. Freuler, Cabinet de travail, 1890, photograph on albumen paper

The photographer Jules Dornac pictured Goncourt astride a chair in his Cabinet de Travail, flanked by his books, portfolios of French engravings, and illustrated books [Fig. 4.9]. Another, Edmond de Goncourt dans son cabinet de travail, has him turned toward the framed picture [Fig. 4.10]. In these two images by Dornac, as in Freuler, Goncourt is shown physically immersed in his collection. In contrast, the writer conveyed the opposite relation in La Maison: as narrator, he suggested the full assimilation of his objects into his life and pedigree. Dornac’s photographs demonstrate that neither was possible. As the only living presence among inanimate objects, the owner is an intrusion. His is an irregular form in contrast to the geometry of vertical books and horizontal shelves. When faced away from them, his torso and legs straddling a chair echo, but only imperfectly, the 134

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4.9  Jules Dornac, Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt, from “Les Contemporains chez eux,” ca.1890, photograph on albumen paper

curves of the small vessels over his shoulder [Fig. 4.9]. His neck and shoulder match the contour of the vase on the right, his legs, the tiny legs of the mount below. Even so, despite the emphatic integration of autobiography and things in La Maison, Goncourt is an outsized intruder to the worlds miniaturized by books, portfolios, and pots in the photograph. His extended legs and seat below introduce diagonal lines, a triangle that cuts across the book shelf to his left and the great armoire on the right [Fig. 4.10]. In both photographs he is the dominant contrasting figure in the room. This pair of photographs also shows that objects have been moved again. In the “Les Contemporains chez eux” photograph, above, in which Goncourt sits astride the chair, 135

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4.10  Jules Dornac, Edmond de Goncourt dans son cabinet de travail, 1890, salt paper print

the unframed work on paper on the armoire between two vases is Gavarni’s double portrait of the brothers. In the image in which Goncourt faces the bookshelf with outstretched legs [Fig. 4.10], the vase and unframed Gavarni are replaced by Edmond’s framed portrait of Jules [Fig. 4.11]. Instead of contemplating the two brothers, the elder now views his late sibling alone. Edmond himself has been excised from his other half and raised: hanging above the armoire is his portrait by Giuseppe de Nittis, partly cut off in Dornac’s second photograph.165 As he confronted his own elevated representation, a complex set of mirrorings occurred. Indeed, it is a mise-en-abyme created by Dornac’s inclusion of the pastel portrait that itself represented the same room, as Pamela Warner has stated. The large straight-sided vessel on the edge of the table, the angle of Edmond’s elbows at his desk in Freuler’s Cabinet de travail, 1890 [Fig. 4.8], with the window to his right, are all present in de Nittis’s work. The pastel portrait of the senior Goncourt becomes a metaphoric mirror: when seated at his writing table, both the real and photographed writer-collector could look up and see himself and the window behind him in the pastel as if they were his reflection.166 These many layered stagings echo one another. Both of Dornac’s photographs incorporate de Nittis’s pastel; with a 90-degree rotation, Freuler’s photograph duplicates it. Attention is drawn to one more relationship noted earlier: in de Nittis’s portrait, the Journal, whose title is clearly legible below Goncourt’s elbow when seen in full, emphasizes again his twin preoccupations. One financed the other. 136

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One of Goncourt’s only “action shots” was produced by Joseph Primoli in 1891 [Fig. 4.12]. It showed the collector entering his Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient on the upper floor, where he kept the majority of his Asian items. The photograph revealed the systematic arrangement of his objects in his glass cabinets. His pose, a stride frozen by the camera, suggested more than the other images the idea of a guided tour, an introduction to a guarded, private space. Again, no direct identification can be made between the various porcelains in Primoli’s instantané and the descriptions in La Maison, nor would such an exercise be of particular use to our inquiry. It is the way he presented the collection that is of value. The chapter opened with objects not visible in the photograph—the netsuke, miniature sculptures typically made of wood and ivory. He treated its various depictions—gods, genies, heroic and legendary figures. His classifying impulse and explanatory mode are evident here, and given the foreign culture, he wrote longer, more instructive accounts than for his European works. Hence he introduced each subject and its typical iconography. Here, the local pantheon, “the Olympus of Japan,” shown in tiny figurines of Bishamon (protector of soldiers), Daikoku (god of wealth), Yebishu (lord of the sea and patron of fishermen).167 Here, too, the gray-bearded saint (“sennin”), endowed with a high forehead, like the god of longevity, and characteristically holding a lantern.168 The two cabinets devoted to netsuke were followed by one filled with Chinese porcelain. Then Japanese sabers and sword guards, various bronze objects, lacquerware, and assorted bibelots.

4.11  Edmond de Goncourt, Portrait of Jules de Goncourt, 1857

137

4.12  Joseph Primoli, Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient, 1891, photograph (instantané) on albumen paper

4.13  Fernand Lochard, Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient à Auteuil panneau du fond avec la grande vitrine des porcelaines, June 1886, photograph on albumen paper

Equivalence and Inversion

The enumeration of hundreds of French drawings kept below, in his Petit Salon, was matched by a description of the porcelain upstairs, reinforcing the idea that the world of Eastern objects was the homologue of ancien régime France. We find an appropriately different organization, but the rhetoric is no less hyperbolic. The 30-page-long treatment begins in exclamation: “the porcelain of China! This porcelain superior to all the world’s porcelains! This porcelain that created for centuries the world’s most crazed enthusiasts among all fields of collecting!”169 The material was organized by color, then type and shape in La Maison—white, yellow, blue, violet, green, celadon, craquelé, coquille d’œuf (eggshell) porcelain. “The most marvelous [Chinese] cup ever to be seen,” unmatched in all known collections, compelled “disdain for all the floral porcelains of Europe.”170 The superlative register continues for his coquille d’œuf, “the ceramic form pushed to the most extraordinary perfection, whose white surface is animated by the gentle luminescence of the finest enamel.”171 Certain forms were inimitable and irreplaceable: not even the Japanese could reproduce the pale blue of China, or “bleu céleste,” in eighteenth-century parlance, nor could any European approach the finely veined Chinese “bleu turquoise.”172 Lochard’s close-up view of the cabinet on the right side of Primoli’s photograph, whose three glass doors opened to avoid glare, replicates Goncourt’s treatment of his objects one by one in La Maison [Fig. 4.13]. The pictured items again cannot be matched with the text, but of greater importance is the revelation of the collector’s display. It is more intelligible in visual form than in writing that, although Goncourt frowned on Cernuschi’s arrangement, he, too, employed a museological format. It is most evident in his Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient, in which he clearly organized the materials according to a particular logic behind glass. There is another aspect shared with public collections: as in a museum, Goncourt’s objects and their exegesis served to produce knowledge. The author used them to introduce many topics, including local myths of origin, techniques of fabrication, historical styles, or contemporary taste. He implied a grasp of foreign terms, transcribed with a wealth of diacritics and circumflexes: “Tomô tada” (a craftsman), “Guën Tokou” (a warrior).173 When he explained that Fong-hoang, the symbolic bird of the Chinese empress, was pronounced “Foô” in Japanese, he implied a command of both languages parallel to his erudition in French terms of the eighteenth century. Whether he was always right—often his understanding was indeed more intuitive than factual—has less import here than the fact that he engaged with others on Chinese porcelain. His contemporary, Albert Jacquemart (1808–1875), used material and color as classifications in his encyclopedic history of porcelain, and also sought refined metaphors for Chinese glazes.174 Goncourt, in other words, did not invent the terms and categories of Asian porcelain. He engaged in debate with Jacquemart and the latter’s co-author, Edmond Le Blant (1818–1897), as well as Louis Gonse (1846–1921), then formulating a lexicon still in use today (“famille verte,” “famille rose,” less commonly, “famille chrysanthémopaéonienne”).175 Goncourt credited Jacquemart with founding “la science de la porcelaine de l’Extrême Orient,” but contested some of the latter’s taxonomies.176 Thus the group of collectors and writers jointly advanced knowledge of Chinese artistic and material cultures and recognized each other’s contributions. In a review of La Maison, Louis Gonse, at work on his L’Art japonais, noted Goncourt’s careful 139

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descriptions and aesthetic analysis of Asian objects, the translations of inscriptions and signatures not available elsewhere. “It is a first effort,” Gonse wrote. “Others will follow.”177 Desire and Fantasy We turn now to another dimension of Goncourt’s collecting not foregrounded by Cernuschi or Guimet. References to desire occur throughout his writing. In addition to his preface on collecting as sexual surrogate, he repeatedly stressed a lived intimacy with his objects that was affective and at times erotic. Goncourt created this impression in his journal when he proposed, on one occasion, a parallel between research in the archives and contact with a cherished object. After “days in the Archives, in the boudoirs of eighteenth-century adultresses,” he emerged to make a new purchase, he wrote. Alone that evening, “a glass of fine champagne before me, I pull from the pocket over my heart a small, precious thing that I hold in the palm of my hand and examine with love, as if stolen.”178 Through scale the author underlined the inherent physicality of the transaction: the object fit into his palm and sat next to his heart in his breast pocket. It gave him a secret pleasure, as if it were the token of an illicit seduction. The erotics of collecting came through Goncourt’s many depictions of such handling and admiration. As Debora Silverman has remarked, “he wrote of caressing his Clodion statuette as if her stomach and neck had the touch of real skin.”179 He predated Freud, who briefly wrote in 1895 that “every collector is a substitute for a Don Juan, and so too is the mountaineer, the sportsman, and such people. These are erotic equivalents.”180 Both Goncourt and Freud were already preceded by a centuries-old discourse on collecting as madness. The moralist Jean de la Bruyère wrote in 1688 that “collecting is not a pleasure but a passion, often so frenzied that it defers to neither love nor ambition, except in the inanity of its object.”181 Louis-Sébastien Mercier later disparaged the “costly and absurd mania,” the “ruinous folly” of collectors in Tableau de Paris.182 Comic plays relied for centuries on the mad collector as a stock figure.183 This tradition long identified collecting with neurosis, and we find two twentiethcentury followers in Werner Muensterberger and Jean Baudrillard. Writing as a psychoanalyst, Muensterberger examined individuals, both living and dead (Balzac, Emperor Rudolf II), whose “obsessional infatuation with the objects” resulted from childhood trauma. Collectors “reveal the need of the phallic-narcissistic personality” and their chosen objects temporarily ease “the tension between id and ego.”184 In Système des objets, Baudrillard also used the vocabulary of regression, anal-sadistic impulse, symbolic castration, and phallus and fetish, but without Muensterberger’s use of case studies.185 These two examples demonstrate the flaw of a generalizing, diagnostic approach: it ignores the complex social and historical forces that overdetermine collecting practices. Goncourt’s activity cannot be reduced to a sexual surrogate, despite his own claim, and no particular object should be named as his fetish.186 The importance of his work is the revelation of the symbolic value and cost of collecting Asian objects in relation to European art. While I reject the ahistorical explanation of collecting as psychopathology, 140

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I nonetheless want to extend my reading of Goncourt’s construction of China, Japan, and France here through the general logic of desire and fantasy. A common understanding considers fantasy a creative act of the imagination. As the psychoanalytic theorists Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have noted, Freud’s writings corroborate the idea of an illusory production that cannot withstand a correct apprehension of reality. Laplanche and Pontalis subsequently attribute to fantasy (phantasy) a greater complexity.187 It is still an imaginary scene representing the fulfillment of a wish, but in their conception, fantasy is not reducible to “an intentional aim on the part of the desiring subject.” They make the key distinction that the subject, always present in his or her script, plays variable rather than fixed roles in various permutations. Slavoj Žižek adds to the debate when he argues in analogous terms that fantasy is precisely not an imagined state that hides the horror of external reality.188 He is close to Laplanche and Pontalis when he highlights the intersubjectivity of fantasy. For Žižek, fantasy creates a multitude of subject positions among which the (observing, fantasizing) subject is free to float, to shift his identification from one to another.189 It is these more complicated notions of fantasy that are of value to our inquiry: they help us to think in terms other than the obvious one of Goncourt’s collection as the realization of a wish for a better world. The instability of positions, or the open-ended play in fantasy constitutes in analogous terms the intercultural dialectics of France, Japan, and China. The latter two played different, ambiguous roles in the European imagination. Japan was progressive and modernizing, the opposite of China, but its modernity was also considered a flaw, as we have previously reviewed. Japanese art was deficient in antiquity, according to some, and hence largely derivative of the Chinese. But China had become decadent and backward, whereas Japanese art offered models for Western innovation. Europe was variously ahead and adrift; the East and its component states represented supremacy and inferiority. Like Goncourt, Burty thought France vulgar in contrast to the ideal haven for beauty that was Japan. The standing of each country fluctuated according to the context and aim of the debate. Goncourt averred the exceptionalism of Chinese achievement, but he also mapped it on to his vision of French art. The eggshell porcelain and others that he exalted doubled for him as Sèvres inventions. In this fantasy, neither the subject nor object of fantasy had a fixed position. China, funereal and fecal to some, provided a superb opportunity for Goncourt: he removed rare gems from Chinese muck. Collections and Museums I want to look at this juncture between the symbolic and the material from another angle. Like collections, museums encapsulate the two. Attitudes towards the latter, still relatively new, formation were divided in the nineteenth century. In Goncourt’s fiction, the museum represented collapse rather than inspiration. In Manette Salomon, the Louvre was the site of the protagonist’s breakdown. The artist Coriolis found darkness and disillusionment in the Salon carré at the end of the novel. He perceived the “mummification of color,” “the yellowing of time,” instead of the brilliance of modern art 141

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on his final visit.190 “He felt something missing in this gathering of immortal paintings: sunlight.”191 The passage signified more than the demise of a fictional artist: it was the death inherent to museums in a broader sense. Goncourt was not alone to hold this view. The Republican art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger compared the institution to cemeteries of art in his Salon of 1861. A philistine “sepulchral promiscuity” put a Madonna next to Venus, a saint next to a satyr. Moreover, only societies no longer capable of new invention built such monuments to the past.192 Some decades later, Paul Valéry also protested the absurd heterogeneities. Visiting a museum was like listening to ten symphonies at once.193 In their conception, art was to be examined in a focused ensemble at odds with the universal survey museum. Private collectors in the nineteenth century faced the growing expectation that they would donate their treasures to the public.194 It was a post-revolutionary variant of patriotic taste that had no effect on Goncourt. He protected his objects from what he termed “a museum’s cold tomb and the ignorant gaze of an apathetic passerby.”195 By insisting on a sale, he was closer to a prior, more aristocratic custom.196 In the past, the need was often financial. Even the descendants of the Grand Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, were left in debt at the Dauphin’s death. Hence the immediate auction of the celebrated collection. However, Goncourt sold his collection not out of pecuniary need, but because he rejected the museum on principle: the intimacy of collecting and admiring art was incompatible with public access. Display We have devoted much attention to a mainly textual presentation of Goncourt’s objects. However, a particular display—recounted but no longer intact—offers a significant element thus far unexamined in the scholarship. La Maison tells us that he put a singular engraving, “the only one to have the honor of a frame, [which] invites the admirer of French art to ascend the staircase”197 [Fig. 4.14]. It was the engraver Nicolas-Henri Tardieu’s reproduction of Watteau’s canvas, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera of 1733 [Fig. 4.15], a rare engraving that had cost him only eight francs.198 The location is meaningful on several counts. Goncourt reasoned at the most basic level why a stairwell is perfect for the display of art: a momentary stop during one’s passage is a chance to discover a drawing or porcelain that “you would not see if it were always under your eyes.”199 There were other, more suggestive functions. Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera was a key work in Watteau’s career, his reception piece to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.200 Goncourt had long elected him as the greatest artist in the eighteenth century, the inventor not only of the fête galante, but also chinoiserie, first incarnated at La Muette.201 By drawing the reader/visitor’s attention to its installation in a passage between the mainly European art on the ground floor and the Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient upstairs, the collector gave it a distinct role. The framed etching is not visible in Lochard’s photograph (we are now familiar with Goncourt’s rearrangements), but La Maison clearly identified its location. The staircase led to Japanese ceramics and a set of albums in a red lacquer chest filled with 142

4.14  Fernand Lochard, Vue générale de la cage d’escalier, 1883

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

4.15  Nicolas-Henri Tardieu, etching after Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, 1733

Japanese prints.202 The chapter on the Grand Salon immediately preceded the one on the Escalier, which is followed by the Cabinet de Travail in the book. The last object mentioned in the Grand Salon was a pair of Sèvres vases; in the Cabinet, the first item, a costume for Japanese theatre.203 Insofar as an exhibition constitutes an “argumentative space,” Goncourt’s placement of Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera in the metaphoric and material transition between two cultures implied a certain correspondence.204 That he used Watteau to make this spatial and visual argument obliquely, in a modest, utilitarian space, is all the more notable for an artist known for a reliance on allusion. Thomas Crow, François Moureau, and Julie-Anne Plax have examined Watteau’s imaginary scenes of leisure in relation to aristocratic codes and values, the cult of honnêteté that informed elite sociability in the time of Louis XIV and the early Regency.205 They argue that Watteau’s paintings alluded to a withdrawal from the court life at Versailles on which the nobility depended for meaning to enjoy revelries on their estates. Christian Michel recently argued that few of Watteau’s fêtes galantes were first collected by dissatisfied grandees; rather, it was thriving merchants who took them up. Given the rank of this early clientele, according to Michel, works like Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, whatever the subversive content, cannot be reduced to aristocratic, anti-Versaillais expression.206 However, despite the apparent differences, the two interpretations are not contradictory. As Michel himself pointed out, bucolic pleasures were indeed projected on the countryside where the aristocracy imagined itself free 144

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from courtly restraint. Madame de Staal Delaunay, whom he cited, was so taken by the idea of rustic delights greater than any festivity at Versailles, or Sceaux, Chantilly, and Saint-Cloud while touring her suitor’s lands that she consented to give her hand.207 If there is divergence in the interpretation of Watteau’s images, there is nonetheless agreement on the connotations of romance, pleasure and the countryside. By extension, the display of Watteau’s image at the site of transition from Western to Eastern art implied the erotic. The expression “to make a pilgrimage to Cythera” (the mythical birthplace of Venus) in eighteenth-century sources referred to illicit indulgences in the park of Saint-Cloud.208 Boats on the Seine ferried Parisians to and fro for such adventures. The conflation of the allegorical and the real appeared in Watteau’s earlier canvas, The Island of Cythera, of 1709–1710, in which a balustrade behind the elegantly dressed figures with cupids was modeled on the real cascade at Saint-Cloud.209 His ethereal images, in other words, pointed to earthly trysts. Upstairs in Goncourt’s house, the pleasures that Watteau often coyly intimated were found more overtly in Japanese prints.210 The collector kept them in albums in an alcove; he described some in La Maison and his diary.211 That Goncourt put very few Japanese prints on the wall, in the contemporary manner, preferring to extract them from portfolios and the albums he placed in a Japanese lacquer chest at the top of the staircase, added to the intimacy evoked in his text.212 Watteau’s work in the stairwell connoted affinities between Rococo and Japanese decadence. More generally, it expanded the work of the Goncourts in the historiographic and symbolic realms of French art. In their writings on eighteenth-century art, the brothers consolidated Watteau’s profile as a morose genius—the splenetic artist avant la lettre—thereby inaugurating his modern construction.213 There is private resonance for Edmond to see tuberculosis in all portraits of Watteau; the image is not unlike Edmond’s “poor little skeleton” in La Maison, misdiagnosed with consumption.214 Here, another element to the morbid affiliations between the venerated artist, Goncourt’s own childhood illness, his late, sinophilic uncle Armand, his syphilitic brother, and the collection. Goncourt would claim for Watteau’s work “an amusement and diversion from a painful contemplation, like the toys of a sick child who is dead.”215 The metaphoric death is a double one: both of the ancien régime, whose remnants the brothers collected, and their own epoch, when venality and vulgarity allegedly overtook hereditary rank. Scholars have rightly argued that Goncourt’s collection was a work of art interlocking with and also independent of his writing. Each was innovative in its realm. But for the most part, Asian bibelots are still kept apart from the European material when, in fact, the two elements worked in a structural complementarity.216 It is only in the present study and the latest article by Pamela Warner that we find due emphasis on the intercultural and intersubjective makeup of Goncourt’s particular Japonisme.217 As the foregoing has demonstrated, the collector showed the relational web of East and West through display. Each playing their roles, his versions of China, Japan, and France were a critique of dominant culture, of the social order turned upside down. The argument of equivalence and inversion between Asian and European art thus corresponded to wider instabilities. In an earlier time, chinoiserie concealed the shift from an exploratory to a hegemonic contact outside France, and the move from crown to capitalist rule within. 145

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In Goncourt’s century, powers were also unstable as French belligerence led to defeat. The writer explicitly linked his collection to the Franco-Prussian War, as did Duret and Cernuschi. The founders of the Musée Guimet and Musée Cernuschi traveled abroad while Goncourt stayed home to lament his Petit Salon. “Poor little room!” he began in La Maison. “What sad and anxious days have these walls endured when canons brought down the pictures and the fires of Paris burned in the months of December to January 1870 to 1871!”218 France, the enforcer of unequal treaties with China and Japan, in turn fell to Prussia. The vanquished duly ceded its land and gold, as we saw in Chapter 2. In this transformative moment, a collection of Asian objects could confirm or undermine ideas about the international order of nations. Collecting Asian art in modern Europe involved the recognition of their various differences, but also their underlying commensurability as art. This was true of Goncourt, Cernuschi, Guimet, and their colleagues. Goncourt did something else, however. He made Japan and China homologues to pre-revolutionary France to oppose the values of his century. He improbably found the mastery of color and artistic form to be nobler than military or industrial might. A project not without cost: “Since my eyes have grown used to the colors of the Far East my eighteenth century has faded: I now see it in grisaille.”219 Chinoiserie always had its price. Asian art would diminish even the collector’s exalted French paintings. Notes 1 My thanks to Pamela Warner, Frédérique Desbuissons, and Mary Sheriff for their generous and critical readings of earlier drafts of this chapter. It will be apparent below the extent to which I draw upon and engage with Warner’s publications on Goncourt. 2 Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, 2 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), also reprinted in Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Œuvres completes, vols. 34–5 (Geneva and Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1986). Dominique Pety and C. Galantaris introduced and indexed the most recent republication of La Maison d’un artiste (Dijon: L’Échelle de Jacob, 2003). All subsequent references are to the original edition in two volumes of 1881. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 3 Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 280. Cavell examines connections between the concept of collecting and the concepts of thinking, of the self, and of philosophical writing. 4 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities. Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Stephen Bann writes in Under the Sign, 8, “… each historically sited practice [of collecting] was itself grounded in a specific epistemological field .…” 5 Representative samples include Mieke Bal, “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 97–115. Flora Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of Ourselves:The Role of Objects in National Identity (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996). Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, eds., Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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Equivalence and Inversion 6 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:3, “Pour notre génération, la bricabracomanie n’est qu’un bouche-trou de la femme qui ne possède plus l’imagination de l’homme, et j’ai fait à mon égard cette remarque, que, lorsque par hasard mon coeur s’est trouvé occupé, l’objet d’art ne m’était de rien.” Goncourt expressed the same sentiment in his diary on February 26, 1875: “Je trouve aussi là-dedans [the contemporary frenzy of collecting] le symptôme d’une société qui s’ennuie, d’une société où la femme ne joue plus le rôle attrayant qu’elle jouait dans les autres siècles. J’ai remarqué, pour mon compte, que les achats s’interrompent, quand ma vie est très amusée et très occupée . …” cited by Dominique Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 80. 7 Janelle Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76, cites Goncourt’s journal entry of February 25, 1880. For a longer treatment of Goncourt’s misogyny, see Roger Kempf, “La misogynie des frères Goncourt,” in Les Goncourt dans leur siècle: Un siècle de “Goncourt,” eds. Jean-Louis Cabanès, Pierre-Jean Dufief, Robert Kopp, and Jean-Yves Mollier (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005), 217–23. 8 Elisabeth Launay, Les Goncourt collectionneurs de dessins (Paris: Arthéna, 1991) has tried to reconstruct this part of the collection in a detailed catalogue of drawings. 9 See Pety’s summary in Les Goncourt et la collection, 29, based on Launay’s catalogue. 10 See Seymour Simches, Le Romantisme et le goût esthétique du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). Marc Fumaroli, “Le siècle des Goncourt ou le XVIIIe siècle réhabilité,” in Cabanès et al., Les Goncourt dans leur siècle, 17–28. 11 Maurice Tourneux, La Bibliothèque des Goncourt, un essai bibliographique (Paris: Techener, 1897) first devoted a monograph to Goncourt’s library. 12 Edmond de Goncourt claimed in the preface of his single-authored novel Chérie that he and Jules were the first “japonisants” in the 1850s. Œuvres complètes, 9:71–2. 13 Siegfried Bing, preface to Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1897), i–v. 14 Goncourt, L’Art japonais du XVIIIe siècle: Outamaro le peintre des maisons vertes (Paris: Charpentier, 1891) and L’Art japonais du XVIIIe siècle: Hokusaï (Paris: Charpentier, 1896). For more on Goncourt’s relationship with Hayashi, see Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé. 15 Writers such as Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, Robert de Montesquiou; the journalists Gustave Geffroy and Roger Marx; the artists Bracquemond, Carrière, Paul Helleu, Rafaelli, Rodin, Tissot, among others, attended Goncourt’s salon. 16 On the history of the Académie Goncourt, see the essays in Cabanès et al., Les Goncourt dans leur siècle. 17 Dufief, “La critique des institutions académiques à la fin du XIXe siècle,” 277, cites Voltaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1979), 184–5. 18 Richard B. Grant, The Goncourt Brothers (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), 139. Ernest d’Hervilly published in Le Bien Public in June 1882 that Goncourt would give a stipend of 6,000 francs each to ten members of a board to name the recipient of an annual literary prize of 5,000 francs. 19 Pety, “De la collection au prix Goncourt,” in Cabanès et al, Les Goncourt dans leur siècle, 248–9. 20 A number of Goncourt’s descriptions in La Maison were indeed used in the catalogue of his auction in 1897. A few examples can be found in Bing, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient, 22, item 83; 24, item 94; 25, item 97. 21 Alidor Delzant, Les Goncourt (Paris: Charpentier, 1889). Delzant’s essay, “Les livres modernes de la Bibliothèque des Goncourt,” appeared in the preface to the auction catalogue, La Bibliothèque des Goncourt dont la Vente aura lieu les 5,6,7,8,9, et 10 avril 1897 (Paris: May et Motteroz, 1897). Also Alidor Delzant, Bibliothèque des Goncourt, XVIIIe siècle: livres, manuscrits, autographes, affiches, placards, Hôtel Drouot, 29 mars–3 avril 1897 (Paris: D. Morgand, 1897).

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 22 Goncourt wrote about his “Collection des dessins de Goncourt” in La Maison, 1:37–180. 23 Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), born in Hamburg, was a dealer in Asian objects and Art Nouveau. Among his stock of Japanese art, he specialized in ceramics. For more on Bing, see Gabriel Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing. 24 Robert Kopp, “Du Journal à l’Académie,” in Cabanès et al., Les Goncourt dans leur siècle, 261. Zola was later eliminated by his willingness to be considered for the Académie française. 25 See ibid., 263. Kopp explains the investment’s returns and his calculation of 1,369,249.45 francs germinal in 1897 in euros in 2003. 26 See Pamela Warner, “Word and Image in the Art Criticism of the Goncourt Brothers” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2005), for a well researched and fine analysis of the writers. On the pair’s multilayered self construction as a single entity, see ibid., 38–90. Warner is preparing a book titled Edmond and Jules de Goncourt: Writing the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Paris. I will refer repeatedly to her dissertation, but my emphasis is different. I focus on the Goncourt collection in a historicized study of art collecting in France and its larger significance in articulating the meanings of Asian and French art in the nineteenth century. 27 Their critical fortune in France fluctuated. Pety, “De la collection au prix Goncourt,” 257–8, notes that in the commemoration organized by the Musées nationaux at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris on the fiftieth anniversary of Edmond’s death, in 1946, the brothers were demoted to the second rank of writers. Only a selective bibliography from the rich literature on both Jules and Edmond de Goncourt can be given here. On the poetics of Goncourt’s writing, see Grant, The Goncourt Brothers; Bernard Vouilloux, L’Art des Goncourt: Une esthétique du style (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997); and the works of Dominique Pety. The socio-historical is demonstrated by the authors in Cabanès et al., Les Goncourt dans leur siècle. In the biographical vein, see Michel Caffier, Les Frères Goncourt ‘un déshabillé de l’âme’ (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1994). 28 On the possible link between Manet and the fictional Coriolus, see Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 50–51. Theresa Dolan, “Mon Salon Manet: Manette Salomon” in La Critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (St-Étienne: CIEREC, Université St-Etienne, 1989), 43–51. Dolan earlier argued that Manette Salomon, begun in 1865, in the thick of the Olympia controversy, was a rejection of the Manet’s crudity. For the Goncourts, the female nude was the essential subject of modern art and of art tout court; the co-authors staged scenes of Salomon posing for Coriolis to argue for a “refined realism” that avoided both crudeness and academicism. 29 Pol Neveux, preface to the re-edition of La Maison supervised by the Académie Goncourt (Paris: Flammarion and Pasquelle, 1931), 343. Neveux identified the work as a Gobelins tapestry based on Natoire’s Les Forges de Vulcan. 30 Pety, Les Goncourts et la collection, 377–8, and her earlier PhD dissertation, “Collection et écriture: Les Goncourts en leur siècle” (Thèse de doctorat, Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001). 31 Grant, The Goncourt Brothers, 52–3. 32 Paul Bourget, Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Lemerre, 1883), 142–4. 33 Katherine Ashley, Edmond de Goncourt and the Novel: Naturalism and Decadence (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), gives particular attention to La Fille Elisa (Paris: Charpentier, 1877); La Faustin (Paris: Charpentier, 1882); and Chérie (Paris: Charpentier, 1882). 34 Among many examples throughout Goncourt, La Maison, 1:11, 183, 196; 2:249. 35 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:194–5. After a long discussion of Chinese porcelain, he turned to European works. Regarding the French Sèvres production, he wrote: “Pleurons, pleurons cette porcelaine tendre, au charme indicible, à la pâte onctueuse, mélangée de tout, et de je ne sais quoi, et même d’une partie de savon, à la couverte faite comme de la glaçure transparente d’une feuille de verre; car elle est morte, cette porcelaine égendaire [sic], tuée par un savant, par l’illustre Brongniart.”

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Equivalence and Inversion 36 For example, Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 37 Watson, Literature and Material Culture. 38 Ibid., 61–76. 39 Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989), 33. 40 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:293–313. 41 Ibid., 1:306. See Francis Watson and John Whitehead, “An Inventory dated 1689 of the Chinese porcelain in the collection of the Grand Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, at Versailles,” Journal of the History of Collections 3, no. 1 (1991): 13–52. 42 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:293, notes the price of 20 centimes. 43 Louis Clément de Ris, Les Amateurs d’autrefois (Paris: E. Plon, 1877; Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973), and J.-G. Dumesnil, Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs Français, vol. 1, P-J Mariette (Paris: Vve Jules Renouard, 1858; Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973). Edmond Bonnaffé, Dictionnaire des amateurs français au XVIIe siècle (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884; Amsterdam: N.V. Boekhandel & Antiquariaat, 1966 reprint). 44 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:295, “C’est la collection des plus rares porcelaines de la Chine et du Japon, le cabinet ou les amateurs allaient apprendre à connaître le vrai et le beau, et qui renfermait les plus parfaits morceaux d’ancien bleu, avant la substitution de l’email à l’azur naturel, et les morceaux les plus gras et les plus crémeux d’ancien blanc.” 45 Ibid., 1:298. 46 Edme-François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des différents effets curieux et rares contenus dans le cabinet de feu M. le Chevalier de la Roque (Paris: 1745), xii. 47 Bing, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient. 48 I draw on the comprehensive study by Guillaume Glorieux, À l’enseigne de Gersaint: Edme-François Gersaint, Marchand d’art sur le Pont Notre-Dame (1694–1750) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002). 49 Ibid., 296, 322. See also Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London: Victoria and Albert Museum and Getty, 1996). 50 Glorieux, À l’enseigne de Gersaint, 295, 314. Gersaint wrote the catalogue raisonné for all three collectors. 51 Andrew McClellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 7, no. 3 (September 1996): 439–56. 52 For more on royal and other collections of Asian art, see Stéphane Castelluccio, Les Collections royales d’objets d’art de François Ier à la Révolution (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2002). Monika Kopplin, Les Laques du Japon: Collections de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001). Thibaut Wolvesperges, Le Meuble français en laque au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de l’amateur and Brussels, Éditions Racine, 2000). 53 See Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des bijoux, porcelaines, bronzes, lacqs, lustres de cristal de roche et de porcelaine, pendules de goût, & autres Meubles curieux ou composé; Tableaux, Desseins, Estampes, Coquilles, & autres Effets de Curiosité, provenans de la Succession de M. Angran, Vicomte de Fonspertuis (Paris: Prault, 1747), as one of many examples. 54 See Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 148, for Article XII of Mercers’ Corporate Statutes that specified what commodities would be sold by marchands merciers.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 55 Ibid., 63–70. 56 Ibid., 82. 57 Philippe Sichel, Notes d’un bibeloteur, 58–9, 44–5. See also Monika Bincsik, “European Collectors and Japanese Merchants of Lacquer in ‘Old Japan’: Collecting Japanese Lacquer Art in the Meiji Period (1868–1912),” Journal of the History of Collections 2, no. 2: 217–36. 58 Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, especially Chapter 3, 44–61. Among the European articles that incorporated Chinese and Japanese lacquer were commodes, cabinets, secrétaires, écritoires, trays, and small boxes. 59 François Boucher, Portrait en pied de la marquise de Pompadour, sketch on papier marouflé sur toile, ca.1750, Louvre, inv. R.F.2142, shows a celadon vase above her right shoulder, above an armoire. Similarly, in Boucher, Portrait de Madame de Pompadour, esquisse, huile sur toile, ca.1750, Waddesdon Manor. Maurice Quentin Delatour included a large lidded vase under the table in Marquise de Pompadour, Salon of 1755, pastel, Louvre. See Xavier Salmon, ed., Madame de Pompadour et les arts, exh. cat., Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002), 144–7. 60 Goncourt published all her purchases as listed in Louis Courajod, Livre-Journal de Lazare Duvaux 1748–1758 (Paris: La Société des bibliophiles français, 1873) in his monograph, Madame de Pompadour, Œuvres complètes, vol. 27–9, 360–75. See also Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, “La passion de madame de Pompadour pour la porcelaine,” in Salmon, Madame de Pompadour et les arts, 407, 413. 61 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:199–200. He refers to Duvaux Lazare’s daybook in his library on 292. 62 Bing, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient, 99, “Kôrin. Écritoire carrée à angles abattus. Sur un fond d’or mat qui recouvre toutes les surfaces de la boîte—face, intérieur et revers—se répand un somptueux décor de branches de cerisier épanouies, dont les fleurs et les tiges se modèlent en léger relief d’or, tandis que les feuilles saillissent vigoureusement en incrustations de nacre ou d’étain. A l’intérieur de la boîte, toute cette floraison se combine avec le charmant décor d’un ruisseau, dont les souples méandres d’or serpentent sur un fond d’argent. Au revers se lit, en caractères d’or sur or, la signature magistralement tracée: Hôkio Kôrin. Cette célèbre boîte est incontestablement une des plus belles pièces de Kôrin venues en Europe.” 63 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:229, 233, among many other pages. 64 P.J. Mariette, Description sommaire des Statues, Figures, Bustes, Vases, et autres Morceaux de Sculpture, tant en Marbre qu’en Bronze, & des Modéles en terre cuite, Porcelaines, & Fayences d’Urbin, provenans du Cabinet de feu M. Crozat (Paris: Louis-François Delatour, 1750), 45. 65 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:228. The full entry reads: “POTICHE. Fond blanc, le col entouré d’une large bordure mosaïque au fond d’or, aux réserves blanches, où sont des feuilles aux nervures noires, des fleurs aux pétales lignées de rouge; sur la panse est jeté un oiseau perché sur une branche. Pièce curieuse où la branche de l’arbre, des fleurs de chrysanthème, une partie du plumage de l’oiseau, sont exécutés avec un or glacé de brun, et où, dans la décoration assoupie, éclate une tache de vert semblable à une grande émeraude. Cette potiche qui porte le nien-hao de l’empereur Tching-hoa de la dynastie des Ming (1465–1488), a, écrites en lettres d’or, au dos, cette inscription bizarre: ‘Dans ma maison où l’on cultive le bambou, l’automne est à l’œil ce que la plante de Chouen est au goût, et le vent qui, de son souffle, fait épanouir les fleurs, revient à des époques aussi régulières que le passage des oies sauvages.’” 66 Ibid., 2:351. Née Adelaïde-Louise de Monmerqué, Madame Le Bas de Courmont Pomponne was the wife of Goncourt’s maternal grandfather, Louis-Marie Le Bas de Courmont, a tax collector (fermier général) sent to the guillotine in 1793. 67 Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: R. Laffont, 1989), 3:171 (29 October 1888), “Peut-être y a-t-il dans mon goût pour la japonaiserie l’influence d’un oncle, l’oncle Armand, le frère préféré de ma mère.”

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Equivalence and Inversion 68 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:357: “Ce sont certainement ces vieux dimanches qui ont fait de moi le bibeloteur que j’ai été, que je suis, que je serai toute ma vie.” 69 Goncourt did not mention his father here. Caffier, Les Frères Goncourt, 13, notes that Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt (1787–1834), captain of the artillery, fought in Napoleon’s wars all over Europe, including the Russian campaign in 1812. He became chevalier of Legion of Honor in 1818. 70 See ibid., 9–25, which gives a detailed treatment of Goncourt’s family and for the family tree, 386–7. In ibid., 10–11, Caffier notes that Goncourt’s grandfather Jean-Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1753– 1829) acquired the title “seigneur de Noncourt et de Goncourt” when he purchased the domain of La Papeterie in 1786. He had been bailli du comté de Clefmont, a magistrate at Neufchâteau in Lorraine and avocat au Parlement, and subsequently an elected member of the Assemblée Nationale in 1789. He married Elisabeth-Mathilde Diez, whose family was ennobled in the seventeenth century for creating the transport company Laffitte et Caillard. On Goncourt’s anxieties of association with the bourgeoisie, see Warner, “Word and Image,” 320. 71 Colin Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 72 Ibid., 33–69. 73 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:299. 74 Johnson, “Japanese Prints,” 345. 75 Ibid., 344–5. 76 Ibid., 343–8. 77 See Geneviève Lacambre, “Les collectionneurs japonisants au temps des Goncourt,” in Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, vol. 4 (1995–96), 164–70. See also Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé, 17–20. 78 Goncourt, Journal, 1:706 ( June 8, 1861). 79 Inaga, “Théodore Duret (1838–1927),” 3:794. 80 See Manuela Moscatiello, Le japonisme de Giuseppe de Nittis: Un peintre italien en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 62–6 for a longer list of establishments in Paris that sold items variously classified as “chinoiseries et japoneries,” “curiosités,” and the like. 81 Ibid. 82 Raymond Koechlin, Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient (Chalon-sur-Sâone: Imprimerie française et orientale, 1930), 69. 83 Inaga, “Théodore Duret (1838–1927),” 3:791–4. Also see Pamela Warner, “Compare and Contrast: Rhetorical Strategies in Edmond de Goncourt’s Japonisme,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 8, no. 1 (Spring 2009), . 84 See letters from Hayashi to Goncourt in Bibliothèque nationale de France MSS n.a.f. 22465 (microform 14574), nos.101–6, 126. For more on the relationship between Goncourt and Hayashi, see KoyamaRichard, Japon rêvé. 85 Geneviève Lacambre, “Les collectionneurs japonisants au temps des Goncourt,” Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt 4 (1995–96): 167. 86 Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, and Musée National d’Art Occidental, Tokyo, Le Japonisme, exh. cat. (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988), 86. On collectors of Asian arts in France and across Europe, see Koechlin, Souvenirs. 87 Goncourt, Journal, 2:1016 ( July 17, 1883).

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 88 Put, Plunder and Pleasure, 33–4. Put’s volume is a translation of Philippe Sichel’s account of 1883, Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon. 89 Goncourt, Journal, 2:745 ( July 27, 1877). 90 Goncourt correspondence, BnF, MSS, n.a.fr 22460 (microfilm 14569), no. 302 [1884], signed “Veuve Desoye.” 91 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:295. 92 See the Chronique des arts et de la curiosité: supplément à la Gazette des beaux-arts (Paris: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1861–1922). Auctions of Asian porcelains, bronzes, lacquer, etc. were announced in the first issues onward. 93 Ernest Leroux, Collection Philippe Burty: Catalogue de peintures et estampes japonaises, de miniatures Indo-Persanes et de livres relatifs à l’Orient et au Japon, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, rue Drouot (Paris: Ernest Leroux, éditeur, 1891). Pety, “De la collection au prix Goncourt,” 248n11, writes that Goncourt played a significant role in the auction’s success through his astute choices in the items to be sold. 94 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:31. 95 Ibid., “Car, en ces années, il y avait des dessins partout, des dessins mêlés à de la ferraille, des dessins exposés entre des tire-bouchons sur des bouts de trottoir, et l’un de mes Watteau me vient d’un vendeur de flêches de sauvages et de têtes d’Indiens boucanées.” 96 Ibid., 1:32–7. 97 Ibid., 1:35–6. 98 Put, Plunder and Pleasure, 33. 99 Goncourt, Journal, 2:650 ( June 17, 1875), “L’étonnement est extrême chez moi, en voyant la révolution qui s’est faite tout d’un coup dans les habitudes de la génération nouvelle des marchands de bric-à-brac. Hier, c’était des ferrailleurs, des Auvergnats, des Vidalenc en un mot. Aujourd’hui, ce sont des messieurs habillés par nos tailleurs, achetant et lisant des livres et ayant des femmes aussi distinguées que les femmes de notre société; des messieurs donnant des dîners servis par des domestiques en cravates blanches.” 100 Goncourt mentioned Alphonse de Rothschild (1827–1905), Isaac de Camondo (1851–1911), and his cousin Moïse (1860–1935). On Goncourt’s anti-Semitism, see Michel Winock, “L’antisémitisme des Goncourt,” in Cabanès et al., Les Goncourt dans leur siècle, 193–202. 101 Goncourt, Journal, 2:801 (October 16, 1878), “Les marchands de curiosité ont ajouté une corde curieuse à leur arc: leur boutique ou leur hôtel est devenu une sorte de maison de passe, où se donnent rendezvous les amours de la haute société.” 102 Ibid., 2:650–51 ( July 1, 1875), “Je faisais ces réflexions chez Auguste Sichel devant un potage aux nids d’hirondelles, et en remarquant le pied d’égalité pris par le maître de la maison avec les opulents clients que le ménage avait à sa table. Le commerce—et ce commerce—n’est plus chez le vendeur un état d’infériorité vis-à-vis de l’acheteur, qui semble au contraire l’obligé du vendeur.” 103 On the use of chinoiserie and the history of rococo interior decoration in eighteenth-century France, see the classic work of Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 104 Abraham du Pradel, Le Livre commode contenant les adresses de la ville de Paris et le trésor des almanachs pour l’année bissextile 1692 (Paris: 1692), 68–9.

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Equivalence and Inversion 105 Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des différents effets curieux, stated that La Roque, the first to collect lacquer, inspired others to do the same. In a section on lacquer, 95–6, “Les morceaux de choix, sont de même, extrêmement rares à trouver, particulierement quand ils sont anciens. Ils sont quelque-fois portez à des prix qui étonnent, même en Hollande. Il est cependant difficile d’en trouver aujourd’hui de beaux & d’ancien dans ce pays-là, par la quantité de morceaux qu’on en a tiré … mais j’y ai entendu dire plusieurs fois, que cet ancien Lacq étoit encore plus estimé & plus cher au Japon que chez eux; qu’ils n’y achetoient jamais ces sortes de morceaux, par rapport à leur rareté & à leur cherté, & qu’ils ne tomboient entre leurs mains que par l’occasion des Présens que faisoient les Japonnois aux principaux Chefs ou Négocians d’entr’eux .…” 106 Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des bijoux, 19, “… que les Japonois, dans ces deux Parties [porcelain and lacquer], & même dans leurs Manufactures d’Etoffes, sont beaucoup supérieurs aux Chinois.” Also ibid., 119, “Il est donc constamment décidé qu’il n’y a nulle comparaison à faire, du plus beau Lacq du Japon avec le plus beau qui se soit jamais fait à la Chine. Ce dernier, même, au jugement des Connoisseurs, n’a pour eux aucun attrait.” 107 Katie Scott, “Playing Games with Otherness: Watteau’s Chinese Cabinet at the Château de la Muette,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 66 (2003): 189–248. 108 Ibid., 193, gives a fine analysis of the surviving drawings of Watteau’s and Claude III Audran’s design for the cabinet chinois. 109 Ibid., 193. 110 Ibid., 191. 111 Jules Sottas, Histoire de la Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales 1664–1719 (Paris: Plon, 1905; Rennes: La Découvrance, 1994 reprint), 101–5. 112 François Charpentier, Discours d’un fidèle sujet du roi touchant l’établissement d’une compagnie françoise pour le commerce des Indes orientales (Paris: 1664), 6, “Pourquoy faudroit-il que les Portugais, les Hollandois, les Anglois, les Danois, allassent tous les jours dans les Indes Orientales, y possedassent des magazins & des forteresses, & que les François n’y eussent jamais ni l’un ni l’autre?” 113 See David C. Wellington, French East Indies Companies: An Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006) and Philippe Haudrère, Les Compagnies des Indes Orientales: Trois siècles de rencontre entre Orientaux et Occidentaux (1600–1858) (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2006) for comprehensive histories. 114 Sottas, Histoire, 336–46. 115 Scott, “Playing Games,” 232. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. See Scott’s detailed discussion of archival documents for d’Armenonville and Jeanne Gilbert, 193–5, 232n149. 118 Kopp, “Du Journal à l’Académie,” 265. Kopp notes that the Goncourt brothers always wrote “le bourgeois” and “le public” in the singular. 119 Isabelle Vissière and Jean-Louis Vissière, eds., Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des Jésuites de Chine 1702–1776 (Paris: Editions Desjonquères, 2001). Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis qua sacris qua profanes, nec non variis naturae et artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata (Antwerp: 1667). Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 288, notes that Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie, published in Nuremburg in 1675–1679, is the first Western history of art to include a section on Chinese painting. See also Ninette Boothroyd and Muriel Détrie, Le Voyage en Chine: Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux du moyen âge à la chute de l’empire Chinoise (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992).

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 120 Engelbert Kæmpfer’s compendium was first published in English translation from the Dutch as The History of Japan, Giving an Account of the Ancient and Present State and Government of that Empire; of Its Temples, Palaces, Castles and Other Buildings (London: Hans Sloan, 1727–1728). The French translation is Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’Empire du Japon, traduit de l’anglais (The Hague: P. Gosse & J. Neaulme, 1732). Other major publications include Pierre-F-X de Charlevoix (1682–1761), Histoire et description générale du Japon.… (Paris: Giffart, 1736). Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), Voyages de C. P. Thunberg au Japon.… translated and augmented by Louis Langlès and J.-B. Lamarck (Paris: Dandré, 1796). For a recent translation and commentary, see Timon Screech, Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1776–1796 (2005). Also Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779–1822, annotated and introduced by Screech, 2006. Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866), Voyage au Japon exécuté pendant les années 1823 à 1830 ou Description physique, géographique et historique, French translation by de Montry and Fraissinet (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1838–1840). 121 Bing, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient, 336–47. Goncourt also had publications by Duret, Guimet, and Régamey. 122 Vissière and Vissière, Lettres, 94. 123 Père Le Chéron d’Incarville, Mémoire sur le vernis de la Chine, 1760, appeared in Jean-Félix Watin, L’Art du peintre, doreur, vernisseur (Paris: Grangé, 1772). 124 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portative (London: 1765), 90. 125 Jean-Denis Attiret, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Paris: Guérin, 1749). The relevant passages are available in Vissière and Vissière, Lettres, 228–44. In English translation, Attiret, A Particular Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens Near Pekin: In a Letter from F. Attiret, trans. Harry Beaumont (London: R. Dodsley, 1752). 126 Porter, Ideographia, 197. 127 See Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842–1907 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999). 128 See Thurin’s comments on the widespread repulsion among British visitors to filth in China, ibid., 191. Duret, Voyage, 75, “On est tout le temps sur un fumier. Ce sont des puanteurs à faire perdre contenance. Et quels spectacles! Dans les carrefours et devant les pagodes gouille un peuple en guenilles; là vous êtes assailli par des culs-de-jatte et des mendiants couverts de gale, de teigne, de lèpre et d’ulcères, qui ont sur le dos la vermine de plusieurs générations, et auprès desquels les mendiants de Callot feraient l’effet de gentilshommes.” 129 Goncourt, Journal, 2:651 ( June 17, 1875), “La conversation a été nécessairement sur la Chine et le Japon,—et a été un tableau désolant fait par Cernuschi du Céleste Empire. Il a longuement parlé de la putréfaction des villes, de l’aspect cimetièrieux des campagnes, de la tristesse morne et de l’ennui désolé, qui se dégagent de tout le pays.” 130 Ibid., “La Chine, selon lui, pue la merde et la mort.” 131 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, L’Italie d’hier: Notes de voyage 1855–56 (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1991), 253–4. 132 Ibid., 253–4, “Parlez-moi de la Chine, mon cher monsieur! Un pays insensé! Un monde à rebours! Une nature à l’envers! Une terre folle! Un paradis de paradoxes! ….” Italics in the original. 133 Stanislas Julien, Histoire et fabrication de la porcelaine chinoise: Ouvrage traduit du Chinois (Paris: MalletBachelier, 1856). 134 The porcelain known as “Claire de lune” in French, or Tian lan you (sky after rain) was reserved for imperial use.

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Equivalence and Inversion 135 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:228, “Et où a-t-il regné un empereur assez artiste pour dire, un jour, comme l’a dit l’empereur Chi-tsong: ‘Qu’à l’avenir les porcelaines pour l’usage du palais soient bleues comme le ciel qu’on aperçoit après la pluie, dans l’intervalle des nuages’? Et où, sur un tel désir et sur une telle commande, s’est-il trouvé un potier pour livrer aussitôt la poterie Yu-kouo-thien-tsing (bleu du ciel après la pluie)?” Goncourt quoted verbatim from Albert Jacquemart and Edmond Le Blant, Histoire artistique, industrielle et commerciale de la porcelaine (Paris: J. Techener, 1862), 137, who cited Stanislas Julien, Histoire et fabrication de la porcelaine chinoise, xxv. Goncourt credited neither. 136 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:255. 137 Warner, “Compare and Contrast,” note 22, cites Goncourt’s journal entry of May 23, 1888, “le Watteau de là-bas.” 138 Warner, “Compare and Contrast.” 139 Jean-Paul Bouillon, “A gauche: Note sur la Société du Jing-Lar et sa signification,” Gazette des beauxarts 91, no. 1310 (March 1978): 107–18. See also Elizabeth K. Menon, “The Functional Print in Commercial Culture: Henry Somm’s Women in the Marketplace,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 2 (Summer 2005), . 140 Moscatiello, Le Japonisme de Giuseppe de Nittis, 75–6. 141 Bernard Bumpus, “The ‘Jing-lar’ and Republican Politics: Drinking, Dining and Japonisme,” Apollo 143 (March 1996): 13–16. See also Geneviève Lacambre, “Les milieux japonisants à Paris, 1860–1880,” in Chisaburō and Tatsuji, Japonisme in Art, 49. 142 Greg M. Thomas, “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008), . See also Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: Intercultural Interactions between Chinese and European Palace Cultures,” Art History 32, no. 1 (February 2009): 115–43. 143 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:13, “Parmi ces bibelots orientaux une merveille française, un bas-relief de Clodion!” 144 Ibid., 1:16. 145 Ibid., 1:2. 146 Jean-François Raffaelli made a portrait in which the Japanese bronze has a massive, central presence in Edmond de Goncourt, 1888, oil on canvas, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Nancy, reproduced in Launay, plate 2, and in Michel Beurdeley and Michèle Maubeuge, Edmond de Goncourt chez lui (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1991), 102–4. Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, 36n19, identifies the objects as a Louis XV chair, a Watteau drawing, Falconet’s bather, Gavarni’s engraving of the Goncourt brothers, and the Japanese bronze that Edmond called a “vase-monstre.” See also Pamela Warner, “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast in Edmond de Goncourt’s Aesthetic Interior,” Studies in the Decorative Arts (Spring–Summer 2008): 36–64. The collector most likely determined what Raffaëlli should represent in the canvas which differed from the arrangement described in La Maison. 147 See Warner, “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast,” especially 49. She identifies many instances of relating French eighteenth-century art and Japanese art in journal entries on September 14, 1861; January 22, 1875; January 11, 1876; May 9, 1886; January 24, 1889; and January 7, 1890. 148 Juliet Simpson, “Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors—Towards the Symbolist Maison d’art,” Romance Studies 29, no. 1 ( January 2011): 2. Also see Simpson’s bibliography on scholarship on Montesquiou, Oscar Wilde, and Frederick Leighton. See also Watson, Literature and Material Culture. 149 Goncourt, Journal, 2:651 ( July 1, 1875), “… ces objets de l’Extrême Orient semblent malheureux: on dirait qu’un mauvais génie les a transportés dans un palais imaginé par le goût à la fois grandiose et bourgeois d’un actionnaire du Siècle.”

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 150 See Davoli, “Henri Cernuschi,” 211–21, for a reconstruction of Cernuschi’s display. For views of the organization shortly after his death, see the reproductions in Maucuer, Henri Cernuschi 1821–1896, 37, 40, 41. 151 Warner, “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast,” 37, notes that Fernand Lochard had a studio at 39 rue Laval in 1886 and exhibited photographic enamels in 1869, 1870, and 1878. Lochard was also commissioned to photograph Manet’s canvases in 1883, after his death. 152 Warner, “Word and Image,” 330, notes that Goncourt wanted diverse techniques, including noir, procédé, couleur, and eau-forte. Beurdeley and Maubeuge, 24, have proposed that procédé may refer to heliogravure. Warner adds that whether noir referred to photographs remains unclear (391n66). 153 Warner, “Word and Image,” 390n65. 154 See Beurdeley and Maubeuge, Edmond de Goncourt chez lui, 129, 131–3. Warner gives a fuller analysis of the album in “Word and Image,” 358–60. The object is in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, Collection Frits Lugt, X.1. Gonc 13.351/GB. 155 Warner, “Word and Image,” 307–77. 156 Simpson, “Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors,” 1–18. 157 Warner, “Word and Image,” 348, identified the reflected spaces. 158 On the functions of symmetry see Warner, “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast.” 159 Warner examines this watercolor in “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast,” 39, and also in “Word and Image,” 310–11. 160 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:21, “Aujourd’hui la salle à manger d’Auteuil n’est plus que la salle à manger d’un vieil homme seul, qui aime mieux la salle à manger des autres.” 161 Ibid., 1:354. 162 Others by Henry Havard include the four-volume Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration depuis le XIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Charles Delagrave, 1887–1890), the 11-part Arts de l’ameublement (Paris: Charles Delagrave, 1891–1897). 163 Simpson, “Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors,” 1–18, refers to contemporary principles of interior decoration proposed by Charles Blanc, La Grammaire des arts décoratifs (Paris: Renouard, 1882) that influenced Henry Havard and Spire Blondel. For comments on the latter pair, see Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, 110–11. 164 Warner, “Word and Image,” 317–19, and “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast.” Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, 110–11. See also the most recent volume, Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen, and Pamela J. Warner, eds., Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 165 Giuseppe de Nittis, Portrait d’Edmond de Goncourt, pastel on paper, 87x115cm. Archives municipales de Nancy. Dépôt de l’Académie Goncourt. Inv. 4Z125. This image is reproduced in color in Giuseppe De Nittis: La modernité élégante (catalog). Paris: Paris-Musées, 2010, 75. 166 Warner, “Word and Image,” 76–7. 167 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:207–14. 168 Ibid., 2:211. 169 Ibid., 2:227, “La porcelaine de la Chine! Cette porcelaine supérieure à toutes les porcelaines de la terre! Cette porcelaine qui a fait depuis des siècles, et sur tout le globe, des passionnés plus fous que dans toutes les autres branches de la curiosité!”

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Equivalence and Inversion 170 Ibid., 2:254, “Cette tasse est la plus merveilleuse tasse qui se puisse voir, et supérieure à toutes celles que j’ai rencontrées dans les collections. Le petit bouquet de pivoines, avec sa légère et charmante exécution, fait prendre en mépris toutes les porcelaines de fleurs de l’Europe, et il y a dans la minuscule petite femme à la robe rose, au profil étonné, qui tient la gargoulette, des délicatesses spirituelles, un art de touche dans l’infiniment petit, que vous pouvez chercher, sans le trouver, sur toutes les boîtes peintes par Blarenberghe.” In the sales catalogue written by Bing, Collection des Goncourt, arts de l’Extrême-Orient, 24, in which this cup is item 94, “Tasse et soucoupe coquille d’œuf. Un petit quadrillé noir sur lequel se ramifie une ornementation d’or mat, encadre deux médaillons d’une peinture merveilleusement fine, représentant, l’une un jeune couple noble, accompagné d’une dame d’honneur, l’autre une suspension de fleurs. Ces deux motifs se réunissent dans la soucoupe en une composition unique, avec un même encadrement.” 171 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:250, “J’arrive à la porcelaine que j’aime, à la coquille d’œuf, à cette matière industrielle, délicate et transparente, où le décor ceramique a été poussé à la perfection la plus extraordinaire et dont la blanche surface est égayée de l’éclair tendre des émaux les plus doux.” 172 Ibid., 2:241–2. 173 Ibid., 2:211–13. 174 Jacquemart and Le Blant, Histoire artistique, 115. 175 Louis Gonse (1846–1921) was director of the Gazette des beaux-arts. An art critic, he wrote the important study L’Art japonais (Paris: Quantin, 1883). 176 Goncourt, La Maison, 2:250n2. Goncourt challenged Jacquemart’s classifications of famille verte and famille rose. 177 Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé, 32, cites Louis Gonse, Gazette des beaux-arts ( July 1881). 178 Goncourt, Journal, 2:753 (October 23, 1877), “Des journées aux Archives dans l’inconnu de l’histoire intime des pécheresses du XVIIIe siècle. Au sortir de là, des séances chez Bing ou Sichel; puis des dîners chez Noël, où un verre de fine champagne devant moi, je tire de la poche de ma jaquette qui est sur le coeur un petit objet précieux que je regarde dans le creux de ma main, avec l’amour d’un objet volé.” 179 Silverman, Art Nouveau, 35, citing Goncourt, La Maison, 1:12–13, 18–19, 181–4. 180 Jeffrey M. Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliesse, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 110, January 24, 1895, Draft H, cited in John Forrester, “‘Mille e tre’: Freud and Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion, 1994), 232–3. Forrester cites Freud’s parenthetical remarks on the collector “who directs his surplus libido onto the inanimate object …” while developing his thesis on paranoia and its relationship to narcissism in 1908. According to Forrester, Freud’s collector is able to relate to the world through beloved things whereas the paranoiac cannot. Freud never worked out a theory of collecting, but Forrester argues that Freud’s own collecting had a symbiotic rapport with his psychoanalytical inquiry. The three thousand Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese antiquities kept in the analyst’s study and consulting room in Vienna and subsequently in London informed Freud’s work structurally and by analogy—the compilation of jokes, dreams, and cases, the excavation of ancient remnants, the archaeology of the psyche. Also reprinted in John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 107–37. 181 Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du Grec avec les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951), 386, “Ce n’est pas un amusement, mais une passion, et souvent si violente, qu’elle ne cède à l’amour et à l’ambition que par la petitesse de son objet.” 182 Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, nouvelle édition (1782–1783), 31, “La manie coûteuse et insensée des tableaux et des dessins que l’on achète à des prix foux, est bien inconcevable.”

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 183 A selection of plays includes Abbé de La Porte, L’Antiquaire, 1751; N.T. Barthe, L’Amateur, 1764; L’Antiquaire, opéra-comique, performed on July 7, 1742 in Paris; La Boutique de Bijoutier, satire dramatique, 1756; Lefebvre de Saint-Ildephont, Le Connoisseur, published pseudonymously in 1773, based on Marmontelle’s Contes moraux; La Coste de Mézières, Le Connoisseur, 1766; Favart fils, Le Déménagement d’Arlequin, marchand de tableaux, 1783; J.A. Jacquelin, L’Antiquomanie, 1799. In the nineteenth century, Barré, Radet, Desfontaines and Bourgeuil, Un Peintre français à Londres, 1802; Anthony Thouret, L’Antiquaire, 1848; Eugène Labiche and Alphonse Jolly, La Grammaire, 1867–96; Henri Rochefort and Albert Wolff, Mystères de l’Hôtel des Ventes, 1863. 184 Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion. See my review, “Models of Collecting,” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 95–7. 185 Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). See the excerpt translated as “The System of Collecting” in Elsner and Cardinal, Cultures of Collecting, 7–24. The citation comes from page 9. 186 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–1974), 21:203. A fetish is “not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that has been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost. That is to say: it should normally have been given up, but the purpose of the fetish precisely is to preserve it from being lost. To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego—we know why.” 187 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1973), 314–19. For another treatment, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality. Retrospect, 1986,” in Formations of Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 5–34. 188 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 6–7. 189 Ibid., 40n6. 190 See Armstrong, Manet/Manette, 49–68. 191 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon, in Œuvres complètes, 32:457, “Au Louvre même, dans le Salon carré, ces quatre murs de chefs-d’œuvre ne lui semblaient plus rayonner. Le Salon s’assombrissait, et arrivait à ne plus lui montrer qu’une sorte de momification des couleurs sous la patine et le jaunissement du temps. De la lumière, il ne retrouvait plus là que la mémoire pâlie. Il sentait quelque chose manquer dans le rendez-vous de ces tableaux immortels: le soleil.” 192 Théophile Thoré-Bürger, Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868 (Paris: Veuve Jules Renouard, 1870), 1:84–5. 193 Paul Valéry, “Le problème des musées” [1923], Œuvres II (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1960), 1290 ff. In English, “The Problem of Museums,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. David Paul (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 202–6. 194 On the increased expectation for donations to art museums in the nineteenth century and the calculations made by donors regarding the return on their benefaction, see my article, “Le Don échangé: L’Entrée des collections privées dans les musées publics au dix-neuvième siècle,” in Collections et marché de l’art en France 1789–1848, eds. Monica Preti-Hamard and Philippe Sénéchal (Rennes and Paris: Presses universitaires de Rennes and Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2006), 87–95. See also Ting Chang, “Alfred Bruyas: The Mythology and Practice of Art Collecting and Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 1996), 77–154. Roger Marx expressed a regret that Goncourt’s collection of eighteenth-century drawings was not entering the Louvre in his preface of Goncourt’s sales catalogue, Dessins, aquarelles et pastels au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, February 1897).

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Equivalence and Inversion 195 Quoted from Edmond de Goncourt’s will, reproduced in the catalogue of his sale, Collection des Goncourt. Dessins, aquarelles et pastels du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1897). See Sylvain Barbier Sainte Marie, “La lorgnette des Goncourt au Louvre,” in Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, vol. 7 (1999–2000), 144–54, on the later donation of a pair of opera glasses to the Louvre in which Goncourt played no role. Pety, “De la collection au prix Goncourt,” 247n9, writes that Goncourt wished to donate one of his portraits to the Louvre, an offer that was refused. 196 Pety, “De la collection au prix Goncourt,” 249, also observed Goncourt’s adherence to an older, more aristocratic tradition of selling rather than donating a private collection. 197 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:193, “Au centre de toutes les images de l’escalier, une gravure, la seule dans la maison qui ait les honneurs de l’encadrement, invite l’amateur de l’art français à monter.” 198 Ibid. Variants of the title of Watteau’s canvas include Departure from Cythera, Embarkation for Cythera, and the French Le Pélerinage à l’isle de Cithère. Goncourt used L’Embarquement pour Cythere. I follow the title used by Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau 1684–1721, exh. cat., (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984), 396–411. 199 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:192, “Je trouve que l’escalier dans un logis se prête admirablement à la galerie, et que les objets qui y sont accrochés, on les regarde mieux que partout ailleurs: il y a, tous les jours, quand vous êtes seul, dans la montée ou la descente des marches, des repos paresseux, des accoudements sur la rampe, qui donnent tout votre regard à telle sanguine, à telle porcelaine, à laquelle vous ne feriez pas attention, si elle était perpétuellement sous vos yeux.” 200 Watteau painted two versions of the painting, the second one commissioned by his patron Jean de Julienne. See Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau 1684–1721, 396–411, for the provenance history of the Louvre and Berlin paintings. 201 Goncourt, L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (Paris: E. Dentu, 1859–1875) in Œuvres complètes, 3:71. 202 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:194, “Sous ces tableaux bas-reliefs, entre deux portes, est un petit meuble en forme de coffre, aux panneaux de laque rouge, dans lesquels sont incrustées une branche de pivoine fleurie, une branche de pêcher en fleurs, toutes deux en porcelaine blanche et bleue: le meuble qui contient la collection des albums japonais.” 203 Ibid., 1:238. 204 The terms “argumentative space” and “visual event” come from Richard Kendall, “Eloquent Walls and Argumentative Spaces: Displaying Late Works of Degas,” in Haxthausen, The Two Art Histories, 63–73. 205 See François Moureau, “Watteau in His Time,” in Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau 1684–1721, 469–506. René Demoris, “Les fêtes galantes chez Watteau et dans les romans contemporains,” Dix-huitième siècle 3 (1971): 337–57. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 45–74; and Julie-Anne Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108–53. 206 Christian Michel, Le “célèbre Watteau” (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 23. Scott, The Rococo Interior, 153, already discussed Watteau’s clientele as comprising mainly of the middling and lesser urban nobility, ennobled robins and functionaries rather the most elite of noble society who turned to Audran. 207 Michel, Le “célèbre Watteau,” 195–9. See Goncourt, La Maison, 1:3, on his retreat and substitution. 208 Moureau, “Watteau in His Time,” 499, reprised by Plax, Watteau and Cultural Politics, 144–5. I thank Mary Sheriff for the Moureau reference. 209 Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau 1684–1721, 261–4.

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Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris 210 See Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700–1820 (London: Reaktion, 1999), 13, notes the first arrival of Japanese erotica in London in 1615. Screech examines erotic imagery known as shunga that served the Japanese audience in unambiguous ways: material evidence of their use is visible on remaining albums. 211 In La Maison, 1:216, Goncourt describes an ivory sculpture in his collection: “Une Japonaise enveloppée par un poulpe. La bête fluente, à laquelle les ivoiriers japonais donnent une tête de caricature humaine, entoure de ses tentacules et de ses ventouses la femme qui, la résistance lâche, la bouche entr’ouverte, une surprise presque heureuse sur la figure, ne témoigne aucune frayeur.” He described an erotic print of the same subject in his Journal. 212 Koyama-Richard, Japon rêvé, 25. 213 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Salon de 1852: Peinture, dessins, sculpture, gravure, lithographie (Paris: Michel-Lévy frères, 1852); L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (Paris: E. Dentu, 1859–1875) in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3. Edmond de Goncourt’s catalogue raisonné of Watteau’s work appeared in 1875. See Michel, Le “célèbre Watteau,” 218, on the role of the Goncourt brothers in framing the modern figure of Watteau and the imprint of the Baudelairean splenetic artist. 214 Goncourt, Watteau in Œuvres complètes, 3:64, “Dans tous les portraits, dans toutes les études que le maître a laissés de son osseuse personne et de sa silhouette dégingandée—apparaît le phtisique.” On his childhood illness, see Journal, 3:172 (29 October 1888). 215 Goncourt, L’Art du dix-huitième siècle, 14. 216 Elizabeth Launay’s Les frères Goncourt collectionneurs de dessins (Paris: Arthéna, 1991), for example, concerns only the European drawings and catalogues. 217 See Pamela Warner, “La Politique identitaire du japonisme” in Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, vol. 18 (2011), 83–101, on the mutual, dialectical construction of France and Japan by Goncourt and Hayashi, and their corresponding ambivalence about this project. 218 Goncourt, La Maison, 1:22, “Pauvre petit salon! Que de tristes et anxieuses journées passées entre ses murs, d’où l’ébranlement du canon faisait tomber les cadres, au milieu des livres ficelés en paquets, et près de ce feu de bois vert, le feu parisien des mois de décembre et de janvier 1870–1871!” 219 Goncourt, Journal, 2:678 ( January 11, 1876).

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“The point of a museum is that it has no history, but represents the objects it contains transparently, in an unmediated form,” wrote the art historian Craig Clunas when he was a curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He noted the difficulty of producing a history of the display of Chinese objects in British museums, given the lack of “descriptive or pictorial information … as to what was shown where when .…” This is more than an accident, or a piece of forgetfulness on the part of my predecessors. The museum cannot allow itself to document its own frequently changing display arrangements, since then it will have a history, and if it becomes a historical object in its own right then it can be investigated, challenged, opposed or contradicted.1

The museums created by Cernuschi and Guimet in Paris show their contents with a different kind of transparency. The original acquisitions of the founders are so labeled and the many subsequent contributions of others identified as missions and donations—the Mission Pelliot or the Donation Grandidier to the Musée Guimet, the bequests of Léon Wannieck, among others to the Musée Cernuschi.2 The provenance thus established, the objects are duly presented with facts regarding their media, form, and function. But nowhere do we find a sign of the messy process by which the valuable objects were brought to their current, brightly renovated homes. We know some of the Musée Guimet’s early institutional history and reception. Upon his return to Lyons in 1877, Guimet began preparations for his museum of world religions. The public first saw his materials in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. Here the links between travel, collecting, art, and politics are evident. For the French hosts, the Exposition was proof to the world of their resurgence (“relèvement”).3 The claims of Louis Gonse, chief editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, are representative of a larger commentary. Gonse asserted that France demonstrated its triumph over “one of the most tragic wars ever to afflict a people, under the blows of all the disasters and devastation of the worst foreign invasion, immediately followed by an unprecedented civil war.”4 It was after living through these very disasters that Cernuschi and Duret set off for their Asian tour. In 1878, the art writer Ernest Chesneau was one of the very few who did not take such a congratulatory view of the French spectacle of the Exposition Universelle. 161

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He was also exceptional in his mention of Guimet’s endeavour, even if only in the briefest terms.5 Although a devotee, collector, and author of many texts on Japanese art himself, Chesneau pointed to the imbalance between France and Japan.6 Outside, in the real world of power and money, the first entirely Japanese-built motorized warship was on its way to Marseilles, showing the nation’s progress in tangible form to the world. His comment echoes the ambivalence earlier indicated by the travelers Cernuschi, Duret, Guimet, and Régamey. “Japan borrows our mechanical and military arts, our sciences,” Chesneau complained in his article, “and we borrow their decorative arts.”7 The mention of illustrious collectors was thus part of his argument: M. Villot, former curator of painting at the Louvre; the painters Manet, Tissot, FantinLatour, Alphonse Hirsch, Degas, Carolus Duran, Monet; the engravers Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart; M. Solon of the Sèvre company; the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury, Philippe Burty, Zola; the publisher Charpentier, the manufacturers Barbedienne, Christofle, Bouilhet, Falize; the travelers Cernuschi, Duret, Emile Guimet, F. Régamey.8

There were, of course, many others not named by Chesneau, who saw the multitude of collections of Japanese art in Paris as an index of French sophistication as well as an imbalance, a failing of sorts. Japonisme was not an equal exchange: “in all the arts, imitation is the perfect procuress of death. It is imitation that kills national practices.”9 Guimet displayed a selection of his objects in 1878 with a small number of items lent by other private collectors. True to his goal of knowledge production, he focused on the religious rather than aesthetic or decorative aspects of his collection. It is evident in the accompanying guidebook, Notice explicative sur les objets exposés par M. Emile Guimet et sur les peintures et dessins faits par M. Félix Régamey.10 The publication noted the role of travel in the acquisition of religious artifacts, paintings, and porcelain “qu’il a rapportés de son voyage dans l’Extrême-Orient,” but without mention of the jinrikis featured in Promenades japonaises.11 But the technologies of mobility had a determining role insofar as the collector could show only the cargo that had arrived in time for the Exposition. Such was Guimet’s commitment to knowledge production that he sponsored the third Congrès provincial des orientalistes in Lyons in the same year. The attendance of the leading Japanologist in France, Léon de Rosny, validated the academic nature of the conference.12 Asian delegates heightened the international and cross-cultural ambiance. Guimet arranged for four Japanese students to travel to France. Two among them had just served as interpreters for the touring Frenchmen, and all four presented papers in Lyons.13 Guimet upheld his commitment as a bourgeois philanthropist. His donation of objects from distant lands served the civic goals of intercultural learning. Much to his disappointment, however, neither specialists nor the general public made use of his multiple offerings in Lyons.14 Quite the opposite. According to a writer sympathetic to Guimet’s undertaking, some negative commentary at the time bordered on libel.15 The founder’s gift of 300,000 francs for the school of Asian languages in Lyons brought no cooperation from the city’s Société d’Instruction primaire, and low enrollment led to the project’s quick end. The Préfet du Rhône refused Guimet any tax reduction, despite his full responsibility for institutional expenses. The Catholic Church, dominant in Lyons, was suspicious of his museum of non-Christian cults. Local authorities feared 162

Conclusion

competition for the existing Musée des beaux-arts, Musée Lapidaire, and the museum of archaeology. For a host of reasons, even free admission attracted little engagement with his newly opened collection. In 1883, Guimet appealed to the Minister of Public Education for a relocation on the grounds that he was too far from both the vital primary materials and the consumers of his “factory for scholarship.” He later recounted with the lucidity of a good businessman that “in such cases one moves the factory. That’s what I did: I transferred the museum to Paris.”16 Guimet ceded his collection to the State, and the Chamber of deputies granted it the status of a national institution in 1885.17 Guimet’s move to the capital also proved difficult. Having met with Catholic hostility in the provinces, he now faced the anticlericalism of the Third Republic. When the transfer of Guimet’s museum was brought to debate in the municipal council of Paris, a representative named Cattiaux stated that the collection had no place in the great capital of modernity. “We can do better than to put a million francs in the creation of a museum of superstitions,” he pronounced. His colleague Monteil, on the other hand, recognized its historical and epistemological value: “Surely it offers a great example and lesson to show all that has been devoted to the superstitions of man from the earliest times to our own?” Gaufrès was another who saw the advantages of knowledge production, while a deputy named Jacques astutely noted that the museum’s true beneficiaries would only be the elite.18 The second iteration of the Musée Guimet opened in 1889, the year of the Eiffel Tower at the Exposition Universelle. After long negotiations, the French State assumed responsibility for Guimet’s collection; in exchange for paying half the cost of a new, neoclassical museum building at the Place d’Iéna, the donor obtained a lifetime appointment as director.19 He finally achieved his didactic goals through the abundant publication of museum catalogues and journals.20 And alongside dissemination in print were professionally organized educational programs. Jacques, the municipal deputy, had been right: it was members of the highest political and artistic circles, including Jules Ferry, Zola, and Degas, who took advantage of the Musée Guimet’s offerings.21 The taxonomic logic of museums offers no place for the constitutive experience of travel and labor. Reification ruled as Guimet’s exotic objects were subject to another kind of representation—the museum itself—from which the founder’s own steps would be systematically expunged. The Indochinese collection at the former Trocadéro museum was transferred to the museum. Guimet’s Egyptian and other antiquities switched places with Asian arts in the Louvre. When Guimet’s museum became the Département des arts asiatiques des musées nationaux in 1945, religion was no longer the focus.22 When it acceded to the rank of the National Museum of Asian Arts, it also became the repository of artifacts excavated at Dunhuang in central China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The donor’s original collection in all these shuffles ended in storage after World War II. It was in 1991 that some 250 of Guimet’s thousands of objects saw their restoration and return to public display. They were not shown at the main site, however; the restored artifacts went to a separate building, on a street radiating from the Place d’Iéna. Today, wall texts in this “Panthéon” present a cultivated industrialist whose utopian-socialist inclination and long interest in world religions took him across the globe. The voyage 163

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that created the museum is a charming anecdote lacking any political or epistemological significance. This kind of history, involving classic narratives of both individual and collective taste and reception, and the effective realization of a museum project, is mostly unchallenged. In contrast, I have employed the theme of mobility to complicate the story. As the cultural geographer Tim Cresswell has put it, “movement is rarely just movement; it carries with it the burden of meaning .…”23 For Cernuschi, Duret, Guimet, and Régamey, it was the desire for order and stability after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune that motivated their journeys. They all returned from Asia with specimens—trophies large and small. Guimet articulated his didactic, encyclopedic ambition more explicitly than Cernuschi. Goncourt, the armchair traveler with a more complex model of collecting, took an indirect and multilayered route that comprised a web of words, images, and displays. I have argued that the socially structured activities of travel and collecting cannot be abstracted from the matrix of political, military, and economic powers. To avoid broad historical generalizations, I have focused on the material and corporeal facts of travel in Asia in the nineteenth century. The particularities were made clear by Guimet and Régamey, who showed how native conveyances and conveyors overturned the accepted equations of technology, modernity, masculinity, and the West. Mobility also characterized Cernuschi’s and Goncourt’s endeavors, but in a figurative sense. Their collections led to recalibrations rather than fixity of value between reciprocally dependent and mutually determining nations. The Parisian collector and art writer Philippe Burty first invented the term japonisme some one hundred and fifty years ago.24 Since the nineteenth century, the Western embrace of Eastern forms has been the topic of inquiry. That Japanese and Chinese forms made a deep impact all over Europe and North America is beyond dispute. However, I have proposed a version of japonisme and chinoiserie that moves away from views of Asian objects as creative inspiration or cause of profound change in Western sensibilities. Bringing to the foreground the social relations of travel, the movement of bodies and objects as imbricated in the politics of East–West exchange allows us to challenge the limits of existing historiography. It is only by examining at once the contrasting scales of individual imagination and national, imperial ambition that we can understand what was at stake in collecting Asian art in modern France. Notes 1 Craig Clunas, “China in Britain. The Imperial Collections,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, eds. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 44. 2 Ernest Grandidier (1833–1912), an industrialist and Auditeur in the Conseil d’État, who traveled to China and India after 1870, was a major donor to the Musée Guimet. 3 L’Exposition Universelle de 1878 illustrée (Paris: Imprimerie de Beillet, 1878), 7, “… l’Exposition universelle de 1878 restera dans la mémoire des peuples comme le plus éclatant exemple de relèvement qu’une nation ait jamais donné au lendemain d’immenses désastres.”

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Conclusion 4 Louis Gonse, ed., L’Art moderne à l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: A. Quantin, 1879), 1, “Onze ans après une Exposition dont la splendeur et les succès semblaient ne pas pouvoir être dépassé, au lendemain d’une des guerres les plus malheureuses qui aient frappé un peuple, sous le coup de tous les désastres et de toutes les ruines causées par la plus terrible des invasions étrangères, immédiatement suivie d’une guerre civile sans précédent, en proie aux déchirements de sa politique intérieure, avec la menace toujours présente d’une conflagration européenne, la France, dans un effort de redressement superbe, a osé convier l’univers, c’est-à-dire tout ce qui sur cette terre travaille et produit, à un rendez-vous plus solennel, plus grandiose, plus largement international que celui de 1867.…” 5 Chesneau, “Le Japon à Paris,” in L’Art moderne à l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: Publications de la Gazette des beaux-arts, 1879), 475, “… mais à l’exception de celle de M. Guimet, qui a un caractère exclusivement religieux, le pêle-mêle des autres et le défaut de classification raisonnée, tout en leur laissant une haute valeur de dilettantisme, leur retirent toute valeur d’étude.” 6 Chesneau wrote a series of articles titled “Beaux-Arts, L’Art Japonais” in Le Constitutionnel, January 13, 22, and February 11, 1868. He also published L’Art japonais (Paris: A. Morel, 1869). 7 Chesneau, “Le Japon à Paris,” 462, “On annonçait récemment l’arrivée à Marseille du premier navire de guerre à vapeur construit par des ingénieurs japonais .… Le Japon nous emprunte nos arts mécaniques, notre art militaire, nos sciences, nous lui prenons ses arts décoratifs.” 8 Ibid., 463, “Le mouvement étant donné, la foule des amateurs suit.” 9 Ibid., 470, “Dans tous les arts, l’imitation est l’infallible entremetteuse de la mort. C’est l’imitation qui tue les écoles.” 10 Notice explicative, 6 indicates 33 paintings. See Omoto and Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde, for illustrations of Régamey’s works. 11 Notice explicative, 5. 12 Compte rendu du 3e Congrès provincial des Orientalistes, session de Lyon, 2 volumes in 4, with engravings. 13 Omoto and Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde, 91. 14 I rely on Chappuis and Macouin, D’outremer, 64–89, for the following. 15 Ibid., 87, cites L. Barthens, “Physionomies Lyonnaises,” Le Courrier de Lyon, journal républicain et conservateur, 18 janvier 1881. 16 Le Jubilé, xiii. 17 Chappuis and Macouin, D’outremer, 88, cites Guimet’s letter to the Ministre de l’Instruction publique du 9 janvier 1883, Archives Nationales. 18 Omoto and Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde, 170–72, cites Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville de Paris, 4e année, no. 76, mardi 17 mars 1885. 19 Omoto and Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde, 100, 104. 20 The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France lists 140 titles under Musée Guimet dating from 1880 to 1996. Some examples include Annales du Musée Guimet; Bibliothèque d’études; Bibliothèque de vulgarisation; and Conférences faites au Musée Guimet en 1912. 21 Chappuis and Macouin, D’outremer, 99. 22 For an account of the evolution of the Musée Guimet in the twentieth century, see Frank, Le Panthéon bouddhique, 54–9. 23 Tim Cresswell, On the Move, 6–7. 24 Philippe Burty’s invention has been noted by Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Philippe Burty and a Critical Assessment of Early Japonisme,” in Chisaburo and Tatsuji, Japonisme in Art, 116.

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191

Index

Page references to illustrations are in bold.

Boxer Uprising 15 Bracquemond, Félix 2, 114, 121, 162 Burlingame, Anson 26 Burty, Philippe 2, 47, 60, 123, 127, 141, 162, 164,

Abe, Stanley 50 Aguiar, Marian 75, 100 alltagsgeschichte (historiography of everyday life) 2 Amherst, William Lord 14 Amiot, Joseph-Marie 19, 53 Armenonville, Joseph-Jean-Baptiste Fleuriau d’ 124, 125 Asian objects, market for 121–3 Asiatic Society of Paris see Société Asiatique Atget, Eugène Un Chiffonnier le matin dans Paris, avenue des Gobelins 86, 87

cango or kago (carried covered seat) 74, 81, 82, 83, 91, 94, 99, 100 Carrier, David 8, 60 Cattaneo, Carlo 40, 44, 58 Cernuschi, Enrico (Henri) 1, 3–4, 5, 14, 16, 17, 19, 29, 78, 79, 86, 120, 123, 126, 127, 128, 146, 161, 162, 164 bimetallism, advocacy of 52 collecting, conditions of 46–50 profile of 41–4 Chang Te-Yi 張德彝 26–7, 29 Cheng Ho 25 Chesneau, Ernest 2, 161–2 China Britain, relations with 14–16 France, relations with 13–14, 15, 45 United States of America, relations with 16 Chinoiserie 39, 120, 122, 124–5, 126, 142, 145, 146, 164 Ch’ung-hou 26 civilization, theory of 45, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 62 Clifford, James 75, 89 Clunas, Craig 7, 50, 161

Bann, Stephen 8, 112 Barbedienne, Ferdinand 2, 59, 162 Baudrillard, Jean 140 Beato, Felice 47, 80 Benjamin, Walter 5, 86 Bennett, Tony 6 Bertin, Louis-Emile 16, 60 bijutsu (fine art) 60 bijutsu kōgyō (applied fine arts) 60 bimetallism, monetary theory of 2, 40, 50–53 Bin Chun see Pin Chun Bing, Siegfried 47, 113, 114, 116, 122, 123 Bird, Isabella 73, 80, 81, 91, 92–3, 98, 100 193

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris collecting 1–2, 7, 75, 164; see also Cernuschi, Enrico (Henri); Goncourt, Edmond de; Guimet, Emile Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales 13, 124–5 Congrès international des orientalistes 54–5 Congrès provincial des orientalistes 162 contact, between Europe and Asia 46 Asian interpretation of 59–61 European interpretation of 58–9 historiography of 53–6 Croquis égyptiens: Journal d’un touriste see Guimet, Emile Crow, Thomas 144

fantasy (phantasy) 140–41 Fenollosa, Ernest 60 Ferrari, Giuseppe 40, 44, 58 Ferry, Jules 14, 163 First Opium War 15 First Sino-Japanese War 17 Flaubert, Gustave 44, 114, 116 Franco-Prussian War 4, 13, 40, 41, 46, 146, 164 Frank, Bernard 78 Fraser, Elisabeth 74 French East Indies Company 117, 124–5 Freud, Sigmund 140, 141 Freuler, D. 128, 134 Cabinet de travail 133, 134, 136 Edmond de Goncourt dans sa salle à manger à Auteuil 131–2, 132

Daumier, Honoré 80 Impressions et compressions de voyage 80 Un premier voyage en chemin de fer 80 Delacroix, Eugène 74, 94 Desoye, Madame 122, 123 Dornac, Jules 134–6 Edmond de Goncourt dans son cabinet de travail 135–6, 136 Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt, from “Les Contemporains chez eux” 135–6, 135 Dumesnil, Jules 116 Duncan, Carol 5 Duret, Théodore 3, 4, 16, 17, 19, 29, 41, 60, 146, 161, 162, 164 China, view of 45 Japan, view of 46 Manet, letter to 53 transport, modes of 86 Voyage en Asie 3, 4, 20, 21–2, 45–50, 53, 61, 126 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 17, 18, 19, 94, 117, 121, 124

Gambetta, Léon 14, 41 Gaskell, Ivan 5, 6 Gersaint, Edme-François 116, 117–19, 120, 123, 124 Girardet, Raoul 13–14 Gobineau, Arthur de 40, 45, 51, 55, 58 Goncourt, Edmond de 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 18, 19, 30, 43, 58, 59, 60, 61, 162, 164 armchair traveler 30, 164 Asia, function of 125–7 collecting desire and fantasy 140–41 polymorphic narratives 127–40 theory and practice of 116–21 collection display of 142–6 dissolution of 114 formation of 113–14 literary scholarship on 114–16 La Maison d’un artiste 3, 112–46 Manette Salomon 115, 141–2 Portrait of Jules de Goncourt 136, 137 Goncourt, Jules de 18, 111, 113, 114–15, 126, 136, 162 La Salle à manger de la rue Saint-Georges 132, 133 Gonse, Louis 44, 55, 139–40, 161

East India Company 14, 117 Elisseff, Vadime 61 Entrecolles, Père d’ 125 Eugénie, Empress 3 194

index Grand dictionnaire universel du dixneuvième siècle 58–9 Grandidier, Ernest, donation 161 Guimet, Emile 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 14, 16, 19, 20, 46, 47–8, 54, 61, 146 collecting conditions of 78–9 motivations for 75–6 Croquis égyptiens: Journal d’un touriste 92 museum, founding of 161–4 Promenades japonaises 3, 4, 20, 96, 162 travel, account of 74, 82–6, 91–2 Guimet, Jean-Baptiste 76 Guo Songtao see Kuo Sung-T’ao

jinrikisha or kuruma (two-wheeled rickshaw) 74, 80–81, 83, 84, 86, 90–91, 92 Julien, Stanislas 19, 126 Kæmpfer, Engelbert 17–18, 75, 76, 94, 125 Kaplan, Caren 75 Kawaji Torō 21 Kircher, Athanasius 18, 125 Kiryū Kōshō Kaisha (First Japanese Company for Commerce or Kiryū Crafts and Trading Company) 60, 122 Koechlin, Raymond 3 Krafft, Hugues 80, 81–2, 99, 100 Kume Kunitake 23–5, 28 Kuo Sung-T’ao 郭嵩燾 28, 29, 52 Kyōsai Kawanabe 73, 89–90

Halde, Jean-Baptiste du 18–19 Harris, Townsend 16 Hart, Robert 25–6 Haskell, Francis 7, 8 Hayashi Tadamasa 60, 113, 122, 123 Hiroshige II, Utagawa 73, 86–7 Picture of the Steam Engine Railway in Yatsuyama 87, 88 Hiroshige III, Utagawa 73, 89, 94, 95, 96 Hsieh Fucheng 薛福成 29–30 Hübner, Joseph-Alexander 47, 73, 80, 81, 82, 92, 93, 94, 99–100

La Live de Jully, Ange-Laurent de 116, 121 La Roque, Antoine de 116, 117 labor, of porters 83–4, 91–4, 99, 163; see also jinrikis Laplanche, Jean 141 Lebas de Courmont, Armand 120, 145 Leicester, School of Museum Studies at the University of Museums and the Making of Ourselves: The Role of Objects in National Identity 7 Li Hung-Chang (Li Hongzhang, 李鴻 章) 28 Liu Hsi-Hung (Liu Xihong, 劉錫鴻) 27–9 Lochard, Fernand 128 Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient à Auteuil panneau du fond avec la grande vitrine des porcelaines 138, 139 Petit salon de la maison d’Auteuil 129–31, 131 Salle à manger de la Maison des Goncourt à Auteuil 129, 130 Vue générale de la cage d’escalier 142, 143 Longpérier, Adrien de 54–5 Louis XIV 13, 14, 124, 125, 144

Incarville, Père Le Chéron d’ 125 institutional critique 5–8, 39 L’Italie d’hier (Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de) 126 Iwakura Mission 16, 23 Iwakura Tomomi, Prince 16–17, 23 Jacquemart, Albert 18, 55–6, 139, 162 Japan Britain, relations with 16, 17 France, relations with 16, 17, 28 United States of America, relations with 16, 21 Japonisme 39, 145, 162, 164 Jing-lar society 127 jinrikis or djinrikis (porters) 83, 91–2, 96, 102, 162

Macartney, George Lord 14–15, 20 La Maison d’un artiste see Goncourt, Edmond de 195

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris Manet, Édouard 2, 17, 53, 80, 122, 162 Olympia 99–100, 99 Manette Salomon see Goncourt, Edmond de Marcuse, Herbert “affirmative culture” 76, 79 Mariette, Auguste 76 Maucuer, Michel 47, 61 McClellan, Andrew 8 Meazza, Ferdinando 59 Meguro Buddha 48, 55, 78 Meiji era 16–17, 23, 60, 61 73–4, 78, 89, 98 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 86, 140 Michel, Christian 144–5 Migeon, Gaston 3, 58 Mitter, Partha 47 Miyoshi, Masao 22 monetary theory, history of 50–53 Motoyoshi Saizan 43–4 Moureau, François 144 Muensterberger, Werner 140 Müntz, Eugène 47 Muragaki Norimasa 21, 23 Musée Cernuschi 39, 40–41, 43, 61, 146, 161 Musée Guimet 14, 73, 75, 76, 78, 82, 89, 102, 146, 161–4 museum, studies of 5–9, 75

Pomian, Krzysztof 6–7, 8, 112 Pompadour, Madame de 116, 119, 128 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 141 postcolonial theory 2, 74, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 112 Preziosi, Donald 6 Primoli, Joseph 128 Cabinet de l’Extrême-Orient 137, 138, 139 Promenades japonaises see Guimet, Emile; Régamey, Félix Régamey, Félix 2, 3–4, 17, 20, 48, 73, 74, 76, 162, 164 The Sacred and the Ordinary Bridge at Nikko 94, 95 travel, illustrations of (Promenades japonaises) 83–5, 87, 93–4, 96–9, 100 Reiber, Émile 59 Rémusat, Jean-Pierre Abel 19 Renan, Ernest 44 Roches, Léon 16 Rosny, Léon de 162 Royal Asiatic Society 54 Said, Edward 74 Sandrart, Joachim von 18 Sano Tsunetami 21 Sarazin, François 54 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 80, 99 Schnapper, Antoine 7–8 Scidmore, Eliza Ruhamah 80, 81 Scott, Katie 124, 125 Second Opium War 15, 29 Shimmi Masaoki 21, 22, 52 Sichel, Auguste 122, 123 Sichel, Philippe 47, 61, 117–19, 122, 123 Siebold, Philip Franz von 18, 75, 76, 78 Silverman, Debora 116, 140 Sloane, Hans 17–18 Société Asiatique 14, 19 Journal Asiatique 19, 54 Société de Géographie 14 Spalding, J.W. 18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 74 Strassberg, Richard 20, 25

Naquin, Susan 49–50 Nittis, Giuseppe de Portrait d’Edmond de Goncourt 136 Outrey, Ange-Maxine 44–5 “patriotic taste” or “le goût patriotique” 121, 142 Pauthier, Guillaume 53 Pearce, Nick 49–50 Pelliot, Paul 19, 161 Perry, Commodore Matthew 16, 18, 20, 89 Pety, Dominique 115 Pin Chun 斌椿 25, 26 Pissarro, Camille 17, 41 Plax, Julie-Anne 144 Pollock, Griselda 18 196

index Taiping Rebellion 15 Takenouchi Yasunori 21 Tardieu, Nicolas-Henri 142 etching after Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera 142–4, 144 Thoms, Peter Perring 53, 54 Thoré-Bürger, Théophile 142 Thunberg, Carl Peter 18 Titsingh, Isaac 121 tourism 22, 75 transport 1, 23–6, 28, 73–4, 80–92, 99, 102; see also Duret, Théodore travel 4, 46, 75, 79–80, 93–4, 126, 164; see also Guimet, Emile; Régamey, Félix Asia, European accounts 17–19, 80–82, 81, 91, 98, 99–100 Asian representations 86–7, 88, 89, 94–6, 96 Europe, Asian accounts 19–20 Chinese 25–30 Japanese 21–5 European representations 80, 86, 87 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (United States–Japan) 16, 21 Treaty of Amity (Sino-Japanese) 17 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation (Anglo-Japanese) 17 Treaty of Huangpu 15 Treaty of Nanjing 15 Treaty of Shimonoseki 17 Treaty of Tianjin 15, 16, 45

Valéry, Paul 142 Verny, François-Léonce 16 Verrue, Comtesse de 116 Verstraete, Ginette 75 VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Companie) see Dutch East India Company Voyage en Asie see Duret, Théodore Wakai Kenzaburō 60, 122, 123 Wallach, Alan 5 Wang Dayuan 25 Wannieck, Léon 161 Watin, Jean-Félix 125 Watson, Janell 115 Watteau, Antoine 113, 115, 116, 123, 124, 125, 126 Enseigne 117 Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera 111, 142–5 Quatre études d’homme dansant, dont une pour “Indifférent” 132 Wilde, Oscar An Ideal Husband 51 The Importance of Being Earnest 51 Wirgman, Charles 83, 91, 96 Xue Fucheng see Hsieh Fucheng Zhang Deyi see Chang Te-Yi Zheng He see Cheng Ho Žižek, Slavoj 141 Zola, Émile 114–15, 162, 163 Au Bonheur des dames 123 La Bête humaine 80 La Curée 80

ukiyo-e 17, 89, 94 Utagawa Yoshitora 89 Utamaro Kitagawa 18, 113, 126

197