ABSTRACT
This chapter explores French critics and historians sought to reconcile the concepts of racial purity, national character, and artistic cross-fertilization in their discussion of the impact of Japanese art on artists such as Gallé. In the process, both Gallé and many of the critics writing on his work came to define a modern, French style not as the distilled essence of artistic tradition but instead as the dynamic invention of an eclectic and constantly evolving visual mode that equated modernity with cosmopolitan hybridity. The chapter examines nature became a privileged point of reference for artists and critics seeking to cast French art as at once modern, original, and national. According to contemporary critics, Japanese art taught Fin-De-Siècle French artists something they had all but forgotten— how to "see" nature. Gallé's published reflections on Japonisme. Each work takes water in some form as its subject, indirectly evoking the idea of "clear water" that Gallé praised only a few years later.
