The Hague Salon autumn exhibition 2019

We’d hereby like to invite you to our autumn exhibition:

‘East meets West’

This exhibition highlights the influence of Japanese culture on Europe at the end of the 19th century.
Art dealer, collector and successful entrepreneur Siegfried Bing has had a major influence on this development. Before he opened his art gallery ‘L’Art Nouveau Bing’, where he sold New (applied) Arts, he had been trading in Japanese artefacts and prints for a long time. From the early 1880’s onwards, there was a true Japan craze in the West. Bing responded to this by travelling to Japan to open import and export companies in Yokohama and Kobe.
Bing’s imported Japanese prints had a particularly big impact on European artists, like Vincent van Gogh who was a keen buyer.

Bing launched ‘Le Japon Artistique’ in 1888, a magazine filled with articles mainly about artworks from his own collection. In the first issue, Bing describes Japanese art as ‘Art Nouveau’, a New Art, which would have a lasting and alluring influence on Western art.
This statement proved prophetic, as Western artists later created their own movement based on Japanese art called Japonism, which turned out to be the birthplace of Art Nouveau as we know it.

At our Autumn exhibition, we present to you a richly packed display window with Dutch and European Art Nouveau artworks, based on Japanese designs. Amongst others, we will showcase a large so-called ‘Japanese Vase’ by Rozenburg The Hague, manufactured in the autumn of 1896. The vase is decorated with Japanese dragons. Not only does this piece of art show that Rozenburg was closely following the fashion of the day, it also depicts multiple references to the use of opium, which was a very popular habit back in those days!

We warmly welcome you to our exhibition, and invite you to enjoy a drink and a bite to eat!

Rachel Reijers, Jaap Nieuwenhuizen Segaar, Rob van Vulpen and Marc Knook