On May 12, 2021, Elizabeth Emery, PhD, Professor of French at Montclair State University, spoke about her new book, Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853–1914 (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). The talk was moderated by Rachel Saunders, PhD, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Curator of Asian Art at Harvard Art Museums, and recently elected member of the JASA Board of Directors.
Although 19th- and early 20th-century women collectors actively bequeathed Japanese works to major museums like the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japonisme has long been considered the province of a small group of elite men. Dr. Emery’s book tells the forgotten stories of French women travelers, salon hostesses, writers, actresses and collectors who engaged with Japanese art alongside their better-known male contemporaries.
In her talk, Dr. Emery brought attention to a few of the figures discussed in the book, using Japanese works they once knew to tell their stories. Clémence d’Ennery (1823–1898), the founder of the Musée d’Ennery in Paris, which houses one of the largest collections of netsuke on permanent display, is a central figure. She began collecting Japanese and Chinese mythological creatures in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the Paris-based “Musée d’Ennery” to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a 50-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d’Ennery’s struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day.