Японская парижанка

Japan had been largely closed to the West for over two centuries, and only in the 1850s did it sign its first trade treaties, after which kimonos, fans, lacquer and woodblock prints poured into Paris. The Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, who lived and worked in the city, was among the earliest collectors of such things, filling his house with them from the 1860s. He made this around 1872, at the height of the craze for all things Japanese. A young Parisian woman stands before a tall mirror wrapped in a blue kimono, a fan in her hand, surrounded by lacquer and porcelain. Almost every object in the room is Japanese, much of it probably taken straight from Stevens's own shelves.