Compare and Contrast: Rhetorical Strategies in Edmond de Goncourt's Japonisme.
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Warner, Pamela
- Source
- Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide; Spring2009, Vol. 8 Issue 1, p1-1, 1p
- Subject
- RHETORIC
FRENCH art
JAPANESE art
ART techniques
ARTISTS
- Language
- ISSN
- 15431002
The article examines the rhetorical strategies used by French writer Edmond de Goncourt in order to come up with the similarities between French art and Japanese art. It says that Goncourt strongly felt that the greatest artists from the two countries were not those who adhered to lifeless academic formulas and official schools, but those who made art that captured and celebrated the vitality and daily lives of their beautiful people. According to the author, Goncourt not only used similar vocabulary to praise eighteenth-century Japanese art and French art, but he also discovered the same historical path for the arts of the two nations. Information on Goncourt's unstable vision of Japanese art is also presented.