D. Sources of Influence and Transmission

7. Goncourt, Edmond de. Works 1891~96.

	Edmond de Goncourt () and brother Jules were the first to identify Japonisme as a cultural movement, calling attention to a phenomenon their own enthusiasms had helped to create.

Goncourt’s studies of Japanese artists were particularly influential in shaping European understanding of the Japanese visual arts in the last decade of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Both Outamaro (Paris: Bibliotheque-Charpentier, 1891) and Hokousaï (Paris: Flammarion, 1896) are unacknowledged sources for Lowell’s japonaiserie, particularly in Pictures of the Floating World (BI8, especially aa), Lacquer Prints (BI4, see especially f) and Guns as Keys (BI7, especially a8). See Schwartz (A18, BI28, and CC1) for analysis of Goncourt’s role in fashioning the European imagination about the Orient.

		Left: title page of Goncourt’s Outamaro (1891); right: William Leonard Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature (1927), which traces Goncourt’s role in fashioning the European imagination of East Asia.