The Nocturne and the ‘Native Village’: contrasting Japonismes in late-Victorian London by Jonathan Parker

This article contrasts two manifestations of the late-Victorian fascination with Japonisme – James Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Blue and Silver (1872-5) and the Daily News’ review of Tannaker Buhicrosan ‘Japanese Native Village’ (1885) – to question how, within the metropolitan context of Victorian London, Orientalist influences could be deployed in radically different ways, for (apparently) different ends. Comparing their antithetical approaches to claims of authenticity, I explore Buhicrosan’s ‘Japanese Native Village’ as a problematic, and ultimately unsustainable, exercise in cultural containment, within an increasingly-cosmopolitan city, and offer a reading of Whistler’s painting as an Orientalist cultural construction that resists an Orientalist reading.