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QUESTION Did Vincent van Gogh visit Japan? DUTCH post-Impressionist painter Vincent Willem van Gogh is one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art. Though he called the Netherlands, Belgium, England and France home at various times, he never ventured out of Europe because he couldn't afford to.
However, he was profoundly inspired by Japanese art. The Impressionist movement coincided with the increased flow of goods, including art, from Japan, which had ended its 220-year-old policy of seclusion in 1855.
In the 1880s, van Gogh bought a stack of Japanese woodcuts in Antwerp. He wrote to his brother Theo on November 28, 1885: 'My studio's quite tolerable, mainly because I've pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls that I find very diverting. You know, those little female figures in gardens or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, gnarled thorn branches.' Van Gogh moved into his brother's Paris flat in early 1886 and bought more than 600 Japanese prints from a dealer.
In 1888, in search of the vibrant landscapes he saw in Japanese art, van Gogh travelled to Arles in Provence to perfect his technique. 'Look, we love Japanese painting, we've experienced its influence - all the Impressionists have that in common - so why not go to Japan, in other words, to what is the equivalent of Japan, the south [of France]? So I believe that the future of the new art still lies in the south after all.' Later that year, van Gogh suffered a mental breakdown. He described the influence of Japanese art on his work as Japonaiserie....