Hokusai Manga and the Circle of Félicien Rops: Félix Bracquemond, Alfred Stevens, and Édouard Manet

Alfred Stevens, A Duchess (The Blue Dress), c. 1866, oil on panel. Clark Art Institute, 1955.865

From the 1880s onward, French critics hailed Katsushika Hokusai as Japan’s greatest artist, reflecting a long-standing Parisian fascination with his work. Central to this reception was the fifteen-volume painting manual Hokusai Manga, a didactic collection of woodblock-printed sketches that functioned as a manual of observation, line, and movement.

Hokusai Manga also became a point of convergence for the Belgian artist Félicien Rops and several of his close contemporaries, including Félix Bracquemond, Alfred Stevens, and Édouard Manet. Regardless of temporal or cultural distance, these artists saw Hokusai Manga as a source of instruction, inspiration, and experimentation.

So, how did Belgian artists respond to Hokusai manga?

The painting above by Alfred Stevens, for example, exemplifies his broader practice of aesthetic invention—appropriating Japanese sources not for their ethnographic accuracy, but as flexible artistic devices. The folding screen behind the elegantly dressed woman adapts motifs from volume 14 of Hokusai Manga, creating a carefully constructed artistic fiction.

Want to know more?

For the exhibition catalogue accompanying Japoniaiseries. Fantaisies japonaises au temps de Félicien Rops (Musée Félicien Rops, Namur), I contributed an article exploring how Bracquemond, Stevens, and Manet received and reinterpreted Hokusai Manga in various ways—as motif, model, and method—and how, in doing so, they joined the imaginary workshop of a master they would never meet.

Read the article (in French) here:

Freya Terryn_Published paper Hokusai manga.pdf

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The exposition runs from October 18, 2025 to February 15, 2026. Find out more here: https://www.museerops.be/japoniaiseries