James McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864 (Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art)
The Allure of the East: Japan’s Impact on the Arts of the West, 1860-1920
Presented by Karen Pope, Ph.D.
Sunday, July 13, 2025 | 2:30PM - 4:00PM
Doors open at 2:00PM
Registration Required
Suggested Donation: $15
Art historian and NCHM Friend Karen Pope, Ph.D., will share one of her favorite topics to complement the Museum’s Daryl Howard exhibition, The Floating World: Tokyo to Texas.
From the “opening” of Japan in the 1850s until the early 20th century, the enthusiastic importation of Japanese decorative arts generated robust collecting and a craze called Japonisme (Japanomania). Modern painters especially embraced Japanese porcelains, bronzes, and woodblock prints, and from the 1860s onward, such objects appeared in their pictures as props, eventually also influencing the subjects and compositional strategies of western artists. Dr Pope’s talk will focus on the embrace and impact of Japanese art on famous artists in Europe and America; her illustrated presentation will review the Japonisme of Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Whistler, Cassatt, and other key figures of the period, as well as the Japanese artists and subjects that inspired them.
About the speaker:
Karen Pope, Ph.D. in the History of Art (University of Texas, 1981), is a specialist in the modern art of Europe and America. She retired in May 2015 from a full-time position on the Baylor University faculty, teaching art history courses in 19th-century European and American Art, the priority of the Allbritton Art Institute.
In addition to three decades of academic teaching, docent training, and informal lecture series, Dr. Pope has offered since 1995 by popular demand lecture programs, art museum daytrips, and art history-rich study tours in the US and Europe through Art inSight Adventures in Art History. Her goal is to expand her companions’ understanding of art history, regardless of their backgrounds. Karen lives in Austin, where she is involved in the operations of the historic Neill-Cochran House Museum.