Japanese Girl Bathing

Japanese Girl Bathing of 1864, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, is an early work painted at the height of the French craze for Japonisme — the enthusiasm for Japanese art, culture, and aesthetics that swept through Parisian avant-garde circles in the 1860s following the opening of Japan to Western trade. Tissot, like many of his contemporaries, collected Japanese objects — screens, lacquer, fans, kimonos — and incorporated them into paintings as both decorative elements and signs of cosmopolitan cultural awareness. The subject of a Japanese woman bathing combines Japoniste aesthetic interest with the established genre of the bathing figure. Dijon, a wealthy provincial city with significant artistic traditions, holds important works that document this aspect of mid-nineteenth-century French painting.

Oil on canvas, the painting requires Tissot to deploy Japanese objects and costume with the same meticulous attention he brought to Western social detail. The bathing scene allows for the depiction of a partially undressed figure within an aesthetic and cultural frame that distanced it from straightforwardly erotic conventions.