DAY 3: Jennie and Japan

1900s Edwardian Tea Gown fashioned from a kimono

When Jennie and Randolph Churchill arrived in Yokohama, Japan, in September 1894, the island kingdom had been open to the west barely forty years. It was Newport's Commodore Mathew Perry who had entered Tokyo Bay in 1853, at which point the Japanese agreed to receive the first Western contact in more than two hundred years. Prior to that, the Dutch East Indies Company had exercised a monopoly on trade with Japan. Perry negotiated a treaty on behalf of the US, followed by trade agreements, and in the decades that followed Japanese art, silks, ceramics, etc., reached America and Europe.

The impact on artists in particular was immense. Japanese colored woodblock prints influenced composition and brushstroke techniques; but everyday life and culture in the kingdom fascinated Western outsiders as subjects to explore in paintings. Consider American James McNeill Whistler, who created an entire room painted in the Japanese style, or William Merritt Chase, whose Western models were portrayed in Japanese contexts. Van Gogh, Monet, and Matisse were only a few of the French artists equally changed by the study of Japan.

Whistler's Peacock Room, courtesy of the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Gustave Leonard de Jonghe, The Japanese Fan

As a painter herself, Jennie would have been aware of the Aesthetic Movement to which Whistler belonged, and the influence of japonisme, as it was known, on the Western art world. What do we know of her time in the kingdom?

William Merritt Chase, Peonies

In her reminiscences, she remarks upon the extraordinary gardens in particular--and we know from her letters that she purchased several bonsai trees and cared for them the remainder of her journey abroad, intending them for her home in London. She purchased a silk kimono as well, and wore it often as a tea gown. 

Indeed, Bertie, Prince of Wales, refers to the kimono in a note accepting Jennie's invitation to tea in the years after Randolph's death. 

Victorian dressing gown from kimono

But japonisme found its way into women's fashion in subtler ways as well. 

House of Worth demonstrates the change: its lavish embroidery gradually altered, moving from tightly traditional European or French motifs in its decorative style and imagery (think: roses, vines, baroque scrolls), to a freer Aesthetic approach that incorporated Asian flowers such as chrysanthemums, gingkos, peonies, and traditional Japanese motifs like cranes. Below, some photographs. 

Worth, Peonies, 1895

Jennie would have found everything visual in Japan--not to mention the haunting music and exquisite customs--utterly absorbing, and welcome distractions from Randolph's erratic moods and increasingly deteriorating health.

white kimono silk fashioned into a European gown, 1870s

stylizied Japanese motifs, House of Worth, 1895

For more images of people, places and fashion from THAT CHURCHILL WOMAN, visit the  Pinterest board behind the novel. 

Worth gown, 1897

Selected