6. Chinoiserie & Japonism
Turn around for a moment: Ensor's painting with blue tones features Japanese prints, Eastern masks, fans, porcelain figurines and vases. We also find these kinds of objects in the works by Louise De Hem and Georgette Meunier: we are literally in the midst of a late 19th-century craze: Chinoiserie and Japonism.
As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, companies such as the Dutch East India Company and the Ostend Company embarked on trade missions to the Far East. They returned with luxury goods such as spices, tea, porcelain and artefacts. These items would not only adorn the salons of the upper classes, they would also become the subject of many still lifes well into the 19th century.
Like Japonisme, the term 'Chinoiserie' refers to European decorative arts that were inspired by Eastern culture. People admired and copied it, but it was also adapted and took hybrid forms.
Works by Louise De Hem and Georgette Meunier offer a glimpse into that distinguished aristocratic world. Both women followed lessons in the Paris studio of Alfred Stevens. As a Belgian painter he made a career in the French capital, where he had a lot of young, female apprentices.
Louise De Hem from Ypres is one of Belgium's best-known female still-life painters. Her compositions were often inspired by 17th-century Baroque, but the two works you see here are rather bold in the way they depart from that. In the large work, a narrow vase of roses rises above some shiny trinkets. De Hem showcases her painting technique in the reflections in a decorative goblet, a small plate and some jewellery. A garment adorned with flowers has an Eastern feel about it. It seems to be sliding over the edge, dragging the objects with it as it falls. Together with the fan and binoculars, they suggest a night out, to the opera or theatre in fashionable Paris. The painting was so suggestive that a Belgian art critic called on De Hem to leave pernicious Paris behind and return to her home in Flanders.
In a smaller piece, she enlivens the composition with a plaster-cast face, an Eastern doll and another fan. It moves the viewer, even if the objects each seem to be asleep in their own way. De Hem paints them in a state of unconsciousness, the objects appear to be alive yet not alive at the same time.
Georgette Meunier's painting is less unnerving. She grew up in an artistic family: her brother painted, her father was a writer and her uncle was the famous painter-sculptor Constantin Meunier. Her father initiated her in the art, but like Berthe Art and Louise de Hem, she was an apprentice of Alfred Stevens. And like her colleagues, she probably discovered Orientalism there too: Japanese prints, fabrics and pottery present in the studio and Stevens' paintings. She developed a penchant for painting luxurious Eastern interiors, as in this pastel, Chinoiseries. A vase surrounded by flowers and crockery is flanked by a Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print, popular with many Western artists in the late nineteenth century.
You can continue your visit in The Drawing Room indicated by number 2.