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FOUR: We see a similar paper lantern in the background of Rupert Bunny’s 1900 portrait of the well-known Japanese actress Sada Yacco in the role of ‘Kesa’. Yacco at the time was in Paris, performing the role at the Paris Exposition, as part of the first Japanese theatre company ever to tour the West. Bunny was later to make another portrait of Yacco in 1907, this time performing the mad scene in the role of ‘Le shogun’. And, indeed, Bunny was not the only Australian to paint Yacco: Ambrose Patterson, who was in Paris at the time, also painted her in 1900. But to return to the two images by Bunny, the first shows her with her face and body turned away from the audience, and the second in full theatrical make-up turned towards them. In the first, her nationality is not part of the meaning or narrative of the picture, while in the second we have the traditional mask of Japan staged for the world. In the first as opposed to the second, that is, it is her femininity that Bunny seeks to capture, her quality as an “everywoman”. After all, Yacco was a celebrity with whom Western women obviously identified (and even something of a feminist, for she insisted on performing with her husband’s company, despite his traditional disapproval of women performing on stage with men).10 And, indeed, aren’t we struck with the similarity between Bunny’s portrait of Yacco and his images of Frenchwomen emulating Eastern odalisques in his series of Turkish baths? That is to say, against either a simple Western view of Japan or an Orientalism, perhaps what Bunny is most interested in is a form of universal Belle Époque femininity—dreamy, theatrical, other-worldly—as opposed to any kind of cultural “truth”?
THREE: And, of course, Japan was in Europe, and therefore in the Australia that was also in Europe. At 25 Cadogan Gardens in Chelsea in 1899, the Adelaide-born artist Mortimer Menpes installed an entire Japanese interior at the centre of his house. Menpes, already renowned for his technically brilliant etchings, had first gone to Japan in 1887 and worked with Hokusai’s pupil Kawanabe Kyōsai, one of the so-called interface Japanese.7 It was, indeed, Menpes’ 1888 exhibition of paintings, drawings and etchings based on his time in Japan at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in London that led to Oscar Wilde’s immortal observation in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (whether positive or negative of Menpes, it is hard to tell) that “There is no such country. There is no such people. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention”.8 In 1840, Menpes travelled to India, Burma and Kashmir with his daughter Dorothy, who had previously been the subject of paintings by Menpes’ friends Whistler in 1885 and Gauguin in 1888 and 1890. In 1896, Menpes returned to Japan and produced with his daughter the best-selling Japan: A Record in Colour in 1901, the same year he set up the Menpes Press to put out the long-running series of books recording his travels (China, India, Venice, Paris). In fact, it was while he was in Kyoto during his second visit that he had built the fittings that he would later install in his Arthur Mackmurdo-designed Arts and Crafts House at Cadogan Gardens. Generally understood as a follower of Whistler, Menpes in his interactions with Asia goes further than Whistler, who never actually visited there. He performs what Broinowski calls the “Expatriate Shift”.9 For Menpes, it was a question not merely of the distant mimicry of a supposed Japanese aesthetic, but of the direct incorporation of a real Japanese space. In the entrance hall of Cadogan Gardens, every plane supports a Japanese fitting or piece of furniture, not as a style but as a physical object (on the floor were lacquer chairs, on the walls silks, and towards the ceiling wood-and-paper light shades). Top: View of Menpes’ studio in the Japanese style, Cadogan Gardens, before 1899 Below: Rupert Bunny, Mme Sada Yacco ‘Le Shogun’ (scène de la foile), c.1907 Photo courtesy The Stuartholme-Behan Collection of Australian Art, The University of Queensland