Another more exotic influence became palpable in his work soon after, and exercised an almost despotic control for several years. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1863 Whistler became acquainted, for the first time, with Japanese art. The Parisian artists, particularly the set with which Whistler was acquainted, got colour mad. The suggestiveness of Oriental composition, which accentuates detail here and neglects it there; the peculiar space arrangement and the decorative treatment of detail, captivated all modern spirit.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the æsthetes of the Empire, and the forerunners of the Japanese enthusiasts, and specialists like Cernuschi, Regamey, Guimet, and Bing became the spokesmen for Japanese bibelots. Paris was deluged with little art objects fashioned out of bronze, porcelain, cloisonne, jade, ivory, wood and metal. Everybody started a collection, and became a member of the "Societé du Jinglar," with annual meetings at Sèvres, which was fanatically devoted to the worship and exploitation of Eastern art.
The harmonious arrangement of the Japanese colour prints in particular fascinated the cognoscenti. The application of colour in Japanese art is somewhat different to ours. It is more primitive, and based on the decorative principle of simultaneous contrast. It deals solely with flat tints with occasional gradations on the outer edges, and vibration is produced by the simple method of letting the paper, or silk, shine through the pigment. If Japanese colouring does not directly recall the polychromic designs of primitive people, of pottery decorations, wall designs, carpets and mats, Scandinavian wood ornamentation, etc., the reason is entirely to be found in its refinement and finish. It has the same origin; a totem pole is the beginning, and a Japanese print about the end of the development.
True enough, coloured prints were classified as vulgar art. They were considered ordinary pictorial commodities of no more importance to the natives than coloured supplements to our Sunday readers. But they were of such exquisite finish that we wonderingly ask ourselves if the nobler branches of art in this country really reached a higher standard of perfection. It is hardly possible. It was rather their application than their art value which offended the nobility. Many of the most cherished prints of Kiyonaga, Sharaku, Shunsho, and Outomaro, depicting teahouse scenes, actors, wrestlers and ladies of the Yoshiwara, were drawn for no other purpose than to serve as souvenir cards and advertisements.
The colour appreciation of the Japanese clerk, labourer and peasant must have been developed to an exceptional degree, if these designs, that were so cheap that everybody bought them as we do newspapers, could arouse nothing but ordinary appreciation and matter-of-fact comment.
The Japanese used colours in combinations that seem strange and unusual to us. They did not seem to care about any complementary laws, but introduced yellow with pink, purple with green, brown with red without the slightest hesitation. This may be explained by the restraint of their palette. Their old hand-made colours are all keyed in middle tints; they did not lack decision or strength, but they were never loud or vehement. Thus arrangements were possible that would look crude with the use of Western colours. Cheret's and Toulouse Lautrec's posters, even when of three-sheet dimensions and seen in open air, seldom expressed more than contrast and animation. They worked on the principle of the Japanese colour print, but in a very crude and superficial fashion. They wished to startle, not to please.
If colour is seen in flat tint patches it produces a more vivid image on the retina than a pictorial representation of mixed pigments, as flat tints are more favourable to the brilliancy of colour. Each separate soft tint creates a complementary image, and the eye would be easily fatigued if the colours were strong. In the Japanese colour print they are softened and blended together not so much by the skilful and harmonious juxtaposition, as by the suavity of the medium, the introduction of neutral tints, the mellow white foundation of the paper, and the arrangement of shapes encased in precise lines.
The European painter had a different idea. Although recognizing the supremacy of colour, he took visual appearances as they were and actually appeared in life as guiding models for his representations. Colour became submerged in other qualities almost equally important, as those of line, perspective, chiaroscura, relief drawing and minute observation. The Eastern artist applied colour for colour's sake, and kept all other elements, notably those of line, feeling, shape and space arrangement independent—not independent as far as the tonality of the final effect was concerned, but independent in their function as vehicles of expression. They were never diffused in the same way as in an Old Master. Each line, shape and colour had to tell its own story, while in Western art composition, colour and idea often became inseparable by the application of the blurred outline.
Whistler, at this stage of his development, was interested simply in recreating Japanese colour arrangements, to paint local values in such a way that they would reflect the beauty, contrast and variety of an Outamaro print. The pictures of this period remind one of that capricious Chinese princess, of whom Heinrich Heine speaks, whose quaint and solitary pleasure consisted of tearing costly silks into tatters, to scatter the rags to the winds and to watch them flutter like rose, blue and yellow butterflies to the lily ponds below.
Already in his "Woman in White" Whistler had shown some preferences for colour, but not until after he had taken his first house in London, when his mother came to live with him, did he show those peculiar outbursts of colour that were a direct outcome of the study of Japanese prints. In later years it was all tone, but in the years 1863-66, it was all colour, with a preference for white. The principal pictures of this period were "Lange Leizen of the Six Marks: In purple and rose" (in the possession of John G. Johnson); "The Little White Girl" (owned by Arthur Studd), "The Golden Screen," "The Princess of the Porcelain Land," and "The Balcony: Variations of Flesh Colour" (owned by Charles W. Freer) and "The White Symphony" (owned by John G. Whittemore).