Japan Meets Holland

Abstract

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) was a Dutch Realist artist, whose works chronicle urban life in Amsterdam. But his paintings of a young woman, collapsed on a divan and wrapped in a luxuriant kimono, secured his reputation as an exponent of European Japonisme. The so-called ‘Kimono Girls’, completed between 1893 and 1896, are compelling evocations of female leisure, subsumed within an exotic melange of vivid color and pattern. More importantly, they are an amalgamation of several cultural contexts that characterized the volatile nineteenth century. European Japonisme, the revival of Dutch painterly traditions, medical dogma, and the beginnings of organized feminism come together in these works, making them both compelling and subversive.