Felix Regamey Goes To Japan

In Promenades Japonaises (22 September 2008) I wrote about Eugene Guimet, a wealthy industrialist from Lyon, France who was an early European advocate of Asian art. Unlike Siegfried Bing, who is better known in the English speaking world, Guimet's interest came from his years studying painting, ceramics, and sculpture before he assumed his family's successful business in 1860, rather than from any desire for profit.

Behind the book Promenade Japonaises is the story an artist, Felix Regamey (1844-1907). An established artist whose work was regularly featured in Le Rire, Le Boulevard, and Harper's Weekly, Regamey was able to offer financial assistance to his friends, poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. The prospect of a two-year world tour in the company of the scholarly Guimet appealed to his desire for new material.
On their way 'East', the two men visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite viewing such inventive wonders as an electric dynamo, the Bell telephone, and the Remington typewriter, nothing there made the impression that the art of Japan would.

Perhaps Regamey's expertise as a caricaturist contributed to his unusual (for the time) portrayal of Japanese life and arts. Missing is the romanticism in style and subject common to Western artists in such scenes as M. Guimet conversing with a monk through an interpreter, and the party crossing The Bridge Between the Scared and the Profane at Nikko.
One trusts Regamey's interpretive accuracy enough to wonder at the significance of the variously colored robes worn by the monks at their meeting with Guimet. The more intimate scene, with seminarians at the Hongan-ji Temple in Kyoto surrounds the group with lovingly detailed depictions of their items of everyday use (the ewer and the bowl in front) and the decorative (the hanging screen, the crane, and bouquet of flowers in back), suggesting the harmony of these things, rather than any differentiation. I am charmed by the small boy, waiting patiently in the corner, perhaps an apprentice.
When he relaxed, Regamey painted watercolors like View of Arayashima, Viewed from Kyoto.

When they returned to France, Guimet wrote his book and opened a museum in his home town (1879) but, disappointed to the lackluster municipal welcome that greeted his collection, he donated it to the nation in 1884. The museum that bears his name, Musee Guimet, opened in Paris in 1888.

Regamey published his own book from their journey, The Japanese Walks of Guimet (1878) and also participated in the production The Theater of Japan at Lyon in 1884. The last two illustrations shown here were designed as posters for the occasion. Even here, Regamey charts the treacherous waters of portraying women from another culture with unusual delicacy and respect: we believe in these women as individuals. Also upon his return from Japan, Felix Regamey became the official Inspector of Drawing for the schools of Paris.

Note: Images from the collection of the Musee Guimet, Paris.