Anglo-Japanese style

The Anglo-Japanese style developed in the United Kingdom through the Victorian era and early Edwardian era from approximately 1851 to the 1910s, when a new appreciation for Japanese design and culture influenced how designers and craftspeople made British art, especially the decorative arts and architecture of England, covering a vast array of art objects including ceramics, furniture and interior design. Important centres for design included London and Glasgow. The style was part of the wider European movement known as Japonisme.

The first use of the term "Anglo-Japanese" occurs in 1851, and developed due to the keen interest in Japan, which due to Japanese state policy until the 1860s, had been closed to the Western markets. The style was popularised by Edward William Godwin in the 1870s in England, with many artisans working in the style drawing upon Japan as a source of inspiration and designed pieces based on Japanese Art, whilst some favoured Japan simply for its commercial viability, particularly true after the 1880s when the British interest in Eastern design and culture is regarded as a characteristic of the Aesthetic Movement. By the 1890s–1910s further education occurred, and with the advent of bilateral trade and diplomatic relations, two-way channels between the UK and Japan occurred and the style morphed into one of cultural exchange and early modernism, diverging into the Modern Style, Liberty style and anticipated the minimalism of 20th-century modern design principles.

Notable British designers working in the Anglo-Japanese style include Christopher Dresser, Edward William Godwin, James Lamb, Philip Webb and the decorative arts wall painting of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Further influence can be found in works from the Arts and Crafts movement; and in British designs in Scotland, seen in the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Design features such as fukinsei (不均斉, 'asymmetry') and wabi-sabi (侘寂, 'imperfection') and simplification of layout prominently feature as aesthetical importation and adaptation in many Anglo-Japanese designers works and pieces. Christopher Dresser, who was the first European designer to visit Japan in 1876, brought back and popularised many influential Japanese aesthetics in his books, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882). The design principle shifted from one of first directly copying (practiced in Japonisme by figures like Van Gogh or Lautrec), to understanding the aesthetic principal behind Japanese art (practiced by Dresser and later Godwin), leading penultimately creating the new Anglo Japanese style. The impact of the shift in how design should be approached can be in seen in C. F. A. Voysey for his wallpaper at Liberty's, who felt that the underlying aesthetic of Japanese workmanship must first be understood to create an independent Anglo-Japanese work, and that to try to reproduce it when solely aesthetical purpose and outside tradition would pragmatically create superficial work. Speaking in 1917, comparing his abhorrence of the many poor contemporaneous imitations and 'traditional Japanese' works to 18th century English Chinoiserie Japanning furniture, he noted that although "we may fitly imitate in an object of our own, the finish we find in Japanese workmanship, but the imitation of its traditional thought and feeling is absurd, Chippendale exhibited this kind of [visual] absurdity when he produced his Chinese furniture".

In the design of furniture, the most common and characteristic features are refined lines and nature motifs such as 'Mons', and most particularly an ebonized finish (or even ebony) echoing the well-known 'japanned' finish. Halen (p. 69) proposes an ebonized chair exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition by A.F. Bornemann & Co of Bath, and described (and possibly designed) by Christopher Dresser as the quaint and unique Japanese character, to be the first documented piece of furniture in the Anglo-Japanese style. The types of furniture required in England such as wardrobes, sideboards and even dining-tables and easy-chairs did not have a Japanese precedent therefore Japanese principles and motifs had to be adapted to existing types in order to meet English requirements.

Dresser noted that the 'Mons' of Japanese Art also have their similarities in Celtic 'rudimentary art'.

Many British designers of the Victorian period were taught the Neo-Gothic design principles of John Ruskin and Owen Jones, principally the Grammar of Ornament (1856), which did not include Japan. 'Ornament' referring to an important aspect of English architectural decorative design for the period, deriving from the popular ornamentation at the time found on the exterior of European churches, and placing this beside nature. Yet by 1879, it was reported that ornamental gothic 'natural forms [had] all the nature flattened out of them, [being] arbitrarily and mechanically arranged', and thus for satisfactorily replacing the Ornament of Owen Jones, Japanese art had 'taught [the British architect] the lesson we wanted, in teaching us how to adapt natural forms without taking the nature out of them. Gothic art showed us something of this; but it did not show it so clearly, nor in so many ways, as Japanese [art has done]'; 'for even their copies are not slavishly mechanical but free ... [shown in] how the Japanese can introduce into a panel something of pictorial expression without loss of decorative simplicity.'

When designing pottery and ceramics, early influences on the style came from 'japonaiserie' influence and early influences show how Dresser working with Minton's incorporated the superficial exterior of Japanese pottery techniques and colour in porcelain, but not its design principles or aesthetical practices. Dresser turned to designing a number of direct Japanese-influenced pieces such as his wave ceramic (pictured in gallery), and later drew from the direct influence of Japanese aesthetics, which he took from his time learning from artisans in his visit to the country in the 1870s. This in turn became in the 1880–1889 period known as 'Art Pottery', under the Aesthetic branch of the style, and was practiced by a number of other potters and ceramicists, particularly stoneware pots. Common motifs included prunus blossom, pine branches, storks and roundels.