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La Japonaise is a 1876 painting by the French impressionist painter, Claude Monet. (Oil on canvas, 231.8 x 142.3 cm). The full-length portrait depicts a European woman in a red kimono standing in front of a wall decorated by Japanese fans. Monet's first wife Camille Doncieux modeled for this painting. The painting was first exhibited in the second Impressionism exhibition of 1876.

= Description = In this painting, Monet depicted Camille in a fabulous red robe belonged to a famous Japanese actor, standing on Japanese-style tatami mat and in front of a wall decorated by Japanese fans. Camille, who actually had dark hair, was represented in a blond wig. The wig emphasizes Camille's identity as a European women, and such identity shows the painting's nature of "artifice" that it only presents Japanese objects instead of having a Japanese interior.

Camille's body is in profile and her face is turning toward the viewers. This elegant gesture of her is likely to be inspired by the traditional Japanese dancing of the geisha. Illustrations of this type of dancing were popular in Europe at that time and available for Monet. (See A Japanese dinner partyby Charles Wirgman for an example.) Art critic Théodore Duret offered a description of the geisha's dance: The dancers only slightly move the upper part of their bodies, and they arrive with a fan to "mark or accentuate their poses".

Monet also put in great effort in the depiction of the samurai embroidery on the robe. The samurai is as vivid as a real one who was "about to fight his way out" of the kimono. Monet positioned the face of the samurai in almost the center of the canvas to emphasize its significance. There are many echoes between the samurai on the robe and the women wearing the robe: the samurai's dark hair and Camille's blond wig; the samurai's scary and "grotesque" face and Camille's beautiful smiling one; the samurai's pale hands holding his sword and sheath and Camille's raised right hand holding the red-white-blue fan which also appeared in one of Renoir's paintings.

Other than the elaborately depicted Camille and the samurai, there is actually another interesting figure in this work. On the right edge of the painting, a Japanese geisha is shown on a rosy red fan. This fan is separated from the others, and its color is also in sharp contrast to the rest, drawing special attention to it. Camille and the geisha's faces tilted to the opposite direction, forming a sense of echo again. While Camille looks out at the viewer with a smile, the geisha in the fan shows an astonished facial expression looking at her European fellow.

= Motivation = Money became one of Monet's biggest troubles in the 1860s. Monet's father had cut the allowance for him due to his rebellious decision to create works totally unsuitable for official Salons at that time. Although Monet's financial condition was largely improved in the early 1870s after his works being recognized and continuously purchased by art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, Durand-Ruel had to stop purchasing paintings from him because the works didn't sell well. Due to this loss of an important source of income and the expenses of moving to a new house, Monet fell back into financial straits in 1874, but he couldn't change his improvident life style. In desperate need for money, Monet created this painting of his wife in a red kimono that he borrowed from a friend, and he sent it to Durand-Ruel's gallery in the second Impressionism exhibition of 1876 along with 18 other paintings including the famous Woman with a Parasol. Given the popularity of Japonisme in France at that time, Monet hoped to sell this painting at a high price to ease his financial crisis. 40 years later, in 1918, when the art dealers, Georges Bernheim and René Gimpel, visited Monet and shared the news that La Japonaise was sold for a very decent price, Monet said that he was ashamed by the fact he painted this work simply to please the market. In his own words, he called the work "a piece of filth". Despite of Monet's negative comments in his later life, some scholars believe that Monet might have been excited to paint this subject. When the painting was in progress, he wrote to Philippe Burty, a famous art critic and collector of Japanese artworks, that it was "superb" to paint the gorgeous kimono. However, other scholars argue that this letter might have been an "advertisement" instead of Monet's true words, because he wanted influential critics who were interested in Japonisme like Burty to write about his work so that his work could receive more publicity and make him more money.

Another possible motivation for the creation of this painting is that Monet wanted to start a "competition" with his friend Édouard Manet's work The Lady with the Fans modeled by Nina de Callias in 1873, which is also a portrait of a European women with Japanese fans fixed on the wall as decorations. There is no solid evidence that Monet had seen this work in person before he painted the La Japonaise, but he seemed to know about it from an engraving of Manet's sketch of the work published in the book Revue du monde nouveau in February 1874. A 1876 review in the journal Le Soleil even described Monet's works as "following suit".

= Criticism = After being exhibited in the second Impressionism exhibition in 1876, the painting received a lot of attention from art critics. Emile Zola and Alexandre Pothey praised the work for its innovativeness and bold use of colors. However, there were also criticism of the work. Many critics described the work as "bizarre" and sexually suggestive. A critic called Simon Boubée wrote in his review: "He has shown a Chinese in a red robe with two heads, one is that of a demi-mondaine placed on the shoulders, the other that of a monster, placed we dare not say where." There are several other writers who also pointed out the position of the samurai's head in a suggestive place as well as his act of unsheathing his sword. There are other signs of sexual suggestiveness, for example, the robe is actually a costume wore by onnagata (male actors who played female roles) who played high-level prostitutes in kabuki, a classic Japanese dance-drama (female roles were all played by male actors in kabuki at that time). Additionally, Camille's "coquettish" facial expression was also said to be part of the erotic symbolism.

These criticism seemed to embarrass Monet, and he probably withdrew the work from the exhibition before its end to hide it from the public, although he claimed that the work was actually purchased by a secret buyer at an unbelievably high price of 2020 francs. Many art historians have questioned the authenticity of this record-breaking price, and they have different stories for it. Some believe that such a high price was a trick played by Monet and Ernest Hoschedé that Hoschedé bought it at a high price and Monet secretly repurchased it back. By playing this trick Monet could earn extra publicity. Another art historian believe that the purchase was a "face-saving fable" to move the public attention away from the embarrassing criticism.

No matter which story is true, the hypothesis that the unprecedentedly high price was not real offers an explanation for the content in a letter from Monet to his friend Édouard Manet, in which the painting was mentioned. In this letter, Monet wrote: "'I would be very obliged to you if you would not repeat to anyone what I told you on the subject of La Japonaise. I have promised to keep it quiet, it would inconvenience me. I count, then, on your discretion and, in case you may already have dropped a word to Dubois, recommend to him the most complete silence, otherwise, there would be endless gossip and annoyances for me.'"It is possible that Monet had told Manet about his trick of the fake price and he didn't want Manet to tell anyone else. There is another explanation for this letter that the thing Monet wanted to hide from the public is the fact that Camille modeled for the painting. Given the criticism for the painting's sexual suggestiveness, it is natural that Monet didn't want the public to know that he painted his own wife this way. In fact, no one ever mentioned Camille's name at all until Monet revealed this fact by himself to Georges Bernheim and René Gimpel in 1918, because the blond wig served as a perfect disguise.

= Provenance = April 14, 1876, Monet and Ernest Hoschedé sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, lot 37; April 19, 1877, anonymous ("L.") sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, lot 48, to Constantin de Rasty (d. 1923), Paris; 1918, sold by Rasty to Paul Rosenberg and Co., Paris and New York; 1920, sold by Rosenberg to Philip Lehman (b. 1861 - d. 1947), New York; 1921, sold by Lehman to Duveen Brothers, Inc., London; 1937, shipped from Duveen, London to Duveen, New York; March 8, 1956, sold by Duveen to the MFA for $45,000.