Japanism and the American aesthetic interior, 1867--1892: Case studies by James McNeill Whistler, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, and Frank Lloyd Wright

This dissertation argues that, between the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, American interior designers used Japanism to present themselves and their patrons as tastefully modern and artistic without being ostentatious, an issue considered of paramount importance during the aesthetic movement. Yet in this period American Japanists' relationship with their model evolved from a more superficial appropriation of surface motifs to an emulation of the underlying structure of Japanese prints and architecture, as the four case studies here demonstrate. Chapter 1 addresses James McNeill Whistler's house at No. 2 Lindsey Row in London, where he lived between 1867 and 1878. There, Whistler first used an additive Japanism, in which Japanese objects were installed in a dense, typically mid-Victorian manner, and later a more austere version of the style, influenced by the simplicity and close relation to nature he admired in Japanese prints and architecture. Chapter 2 focuses on Louis Comfort Tiffany's Bella Apartments in New York, his residence between 1878 and 1884. In that space, Tiffany also experimented with different kinds of Japanism, creating some rooms with a brilliantly ornamented aesthetic indebted to Japanese lacquer and textiles, and others that were plainer and inspired by fundamental Japanese design principles. Chapter 3 discusses Stanford White's dining room for David and Ella King's house, Kingscote, in Newport of 1880--1881. There, White advanced the emulation of Japanese architectural elements, unifying the room not only through Japanesque simplicity and geometricization, but also through the appropriation of traditional Japanese forms. Chapter 4 treats Frank Lloyd Wright's interiors for Adler and Sullivan's James and Helen Charnley house in Chicago of 1891--1892. In such early works, Wright brought Japanese elements to the interior architecture of entire houses for the first time, creating the sort of spare, open, modular, close-to-nature spaces that he believed he saw in Japanese buildings. Thus, while the first American visitors to Japan after 1854 judged that the plain, open, wooden, asymmetrical structures they saw there were not architecture, by 1893 those very characteristics were a major influence on American interior design.