Converging Cultures

Japanese and African culture- the influence it had in the Victorian Age.

Americans were no real threat to British trading supremacy in the East and Britain was happy for the Americans to do all the groundwork negotiations in Japan.

British Treaty of Edo in 1858 

The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 was one of the series of great exhibitions in which nations displayed their industrial and artistic achievements. 

Japanese shapes certainly often display quaintness rather than grace.

At the Philadelphia Exhibit the Japanese exhibits were viewed as odd and curious in shape and decoration. "Topsy Turvy nature" 

Japanese art as being purely decorative was stressed

The display of Japanese art in the 1862 exhibition made a great impact on William Burges who believed that in contemporary Japan could be found the ideal society of the Middle Ages he was trying to recreate in Victorian Britain. 

This was key to the Arts and Crafts Movement which stressed the importance of simplicity, sincerity and a close study of nature all qualities commented on by critics discussing Japanese art. 

During the Victorian period, travellers to what is now Zimbabwe used art, especially painting, to depict some of what they saw there. This art of the colonial period took landscape as its main theme and many of the European artists were present as part of expeditions that aimed to inform the public in Europe about life in Africa. For example, Thomas Baines joined the  Zambezi expedition led by David Livingstone in 1858 and in 1861 he was one of the first to make oil paintings of Victoria Falls. John Guille Mailles spent six months of 1893 sketching and hunting in Zimbabwe.