Reframing Japonisme

Japonisme, the 19th-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the 21st-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement.This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Cl¿nce d¿Ennery (1823¿98), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the ¿Mus¿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