Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

STUDIES - Shinji Tanaka: On Bertalan Székely's Japanese Woman, 1871

The Japanese lady performing her toilette in front of a mirror was a recurrent theme of Japanese woodcuts and prints in illustrated travelogues at the time when Japan was opened to the world and there was a new wave of interest in the Far East. From a book entitled Le Japon illustré by Humbert Aime (1819-1910), for instance, the weekly Vasárnapi Újság borrowed a picture of a Japanese woman at her toilette.

36 (Fig. 3) The theme is also present in contemporary photographs depicting everyday life in Japan. The photographs Xántus brought back from Japan, numbering about eighty, are preserved in the Photograph Archives of the Museum of Ethnography. Most of those photographs show Japanese women.

37 None of them, however, has been identified as a direct source for Székely's Japanese Woman. As Zsuzsanna Bakó has suggested, in choosing the motif and fashioning the pose of the woman combing her hair, Székely might have derived his inspiration from a painting entitled Esther se parant pour être présentée au roi Assuérus (La toilette d Esther, 1842,1 by Théodore Chassériau.

38 But assuming that Székely had indeed seen a picture of a Japanese woman attending her toilette, it is possible that it was a Japanese work depicting a woman in the above-mentioned posture. While some art historians have detected a Japanese influence in the works of Chassériau,

3

" no direct relationship between this painting and Japanese art has been established; a resemblance to Rubens's Toilette de Vénus and Flaxmann's La Toilette de Pandora

40

, on the other hand, has been proved. Although the painting of the Japanese Woman was based on painstaking study and preparation, the composition is still not entirely natural. It is not just that the features of the woman are barely Japanese. In 1872, when the Japanese Woman was exhibited at the OMKT show, Aladár György (1844-1906) remarked that 'Apart from the caption and a few external features, there is hardly anything to suggest a Chinese woman; indeed, one is tempted to think that the lady performing her toilette in a rather confined garden depicted in a barely truthful manner, is a lady from our society circles.'

41 While Székely must have used a European model to paint his picture, it was not his intent to paint a European woman grooming herself in a Japanese manner, but rather to show a real Japanese woman attending to her toilette. His painting is quite unlike, for instance, Monet's La japonaise (1867), J.J. Tissot's Japonaise au bain (1864), Alfred Stevens' La robe japonaise (1870-75), or Hans Makart's Die Japanerin (1875). In Székely's painting, the Japanesque effect may be attributed to the woman's black hair, her facial expression, and her downcast eyes. On the right side in the background of the painting a large twining vine appears. It is probably a morning glory. Székely may have chosen it as a tool to create a Japanesque atmosphere, and he may have done so on the advice of Xántus, who was knowledgeable about Japanese flora.

42 As early as the Edo era, the morning glory was a popular ornamental plant in Japan. It was, however, not an indoor plant; it was cultivated in gardens or on balconies. The morning glory was also known in nineteenthcentury Hungary as a garden plant.

43 It is unclear why Székely chose to feature it in an indoors scene. Assuming that the background of the painting Lajos (Ludwig) Hevesi and Aladár György saw on display was identical to that of the extant painting, then perhaps its was partly the morning glory that led them to describe it as a garden scene. While the fan is a typically Japanese article, the one in the picture is not a common type; it is a sort of ritual object, a richly decorated fan. It is strange to find such a fan among toilette articles. Nor is it usual to find a bunch of flowers near the fan. This seems to be more in line with the conventions of European painting. The woman is sitting on a goza mat. If the interior in the painting was truly a Japanese room, the woman would be sitting on a tatami (the thick straw mat used as a standard floor covering in Japanese houses). A patterned tatami can be seen in Monet's La japonaise as well. Gozas were exported from Japan, and thus could be found in Europe as well. 3. Japanese lady applying lipstick. Repr. Vasárnapi Újság, 9 May 1869