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Japonisme in its earliest phase (until roughly 1900) is most commonly understood as the nineteenth-century Western discovery or even invention (per Oscar Wilde) of Japan. Yet members of the Japanese government and artistic community quickly became aware of Western expectations for Japanese art. Nihonga first emerged in the 1880s within this context.

This chapter discusses the friendship of Fou Lei and Huang Binhong, which can be linked to Chinese art. Binhong believed that it would take years before his art would be understood, and thanks to the Cultural Revolution, there are more practitioners of brush-and-ink painting than oil painting. It is noted that Lei and Binhong explored the common ground within and between literature and art, Chinese and Western cultures, and the past and the present. However, it is their friendship that reminds people of the intrinsic importance of art. It also embodies a joint endeavour to find contemporary relevance and meaning for Chinese scholarly and cultural traditions in the twentieth century and beyond.

This chapter discusses the history of Japanese oil painting from 1860 to 1910 by dividing it into four stages that characterize the acceptance of Western-style art in Japan. The first stage took place in about the middle of the eighteenth century, when a number of painters of the Satake clan in Akita began creating works using Western perspective. The second stage took place at the end of the Edo period, which saw the opening of the Technical Art School in 1876 under the auspices of Itō Hirobumi. The third stage began with painters who went to Europe without any prior training in Western art before their departure, led by Kuroda Seiki. In the fourth stage, which took place after Kuroda’s return from Paris, the painters were sufficiently prepared to face the realities of the contemporary art scene in Europe; one of them was Mitsutani Kunishiro. The chapter also considers the differences between the first and second stages, along with the rise of history painting in Japan in the 1880s and 1890s.

This chapter focuses on Russolo's best-known work, the large oil painting La musica, where his interest in synesthesia and the occult is most evident. This painting is centrally important to the current investigation, as it sets out the poetics of music that Russolo was working out in the years immediately preceding his manifesto on the art of noises. The music in La musica is first a deafening rumorista chaos, and second a spiral of noises (spirale di rumori) that synthesizes this chaos into the sinuous blue band of the enharmonic (i.e., microtonal) continuity. It is thus already an art of noises, a subjective synthesis of all the complementary acoustic vibrations of the universe superimposed according to the futurist aesthetic of simultaneity and dynamism. Russolo's ambition here was not simply to imitate or represent nature but to create, that is provide, the spiritual conditions and the spiritual fuel for the creation of a new reality through Artifice.

This chapter examines the material culture of blackface minstrelsy, and particularly of instrumental dance music in the “creole synthesis,” using evidence drawn from William Sidney Mount's four paintings: Just in Tune (1849), Right and Left (1850), Just in Tune () and The Banjo Player and The Bone Player (1856). Three of the four images in the portraits are most likely of dance musicians (both fiddlers and the bones player), while the fourth (the banjo player) could be imagined to accompany singing but equally likely completes the dance-band instrumentation—fiddle, banjo, and bones representing three-fourths of the iconic ensemble of minstrelsy. All of these works provide confirmation of Mount's expertise in and admiration for the details of African American vernacular music. This chapter analyzes the relationship between Mount's “private” pencil sketching and his “public” oil painting, as well as the complex layers of racial, economic, and political symbolism in his work. It also explores the musical detail of each of the four paintings and their significance to our understanding of the roots of minstrelsy.

This chapter describes the search for Tzatzoe, which led John Philip to the Kuruman mission station. After looking in the old mission church, the modern archive and classroom building, the visitors' center, the outbuilding that housed the original mission printing press, and the mission gardens, Jan Tzatzoe ended up being in the last place anyone would care to look. He rested in a dark and well-shaded corner of the airy mission house, about four hundred miles from home. He stood next to an elderly James Read and James Read Junior. Tzatzoe, however, appeared remarkably different; he was not the Tzatzoe Philip had come to know from a black-and-white engraving. The magnificent oil painting, resplendent in a burnished gold frame, by Room of the London Missionary Society delegation from South Africa has been at Kuruman since 1990, when in a fit of good spirit, the current incarnation of the LMS decided to repatriate it to South Africa.

This chapter shifts focus from Cairo to Alexandria, away from the anticolonial nationalism of the former toward a deliberate cosmopolitanism observable in the latter. From the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1805 until Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in 1952, Alexandria was a veritable second capital to Cairo, and in many ways it was better connected with the Mediterranean world. The informal infrastructure of arts education and exhibition in Alexandria led to a subtler form of Egyptian modernism. Alexandrian artists visualized the multinational atmosphere of their coastal city rather than portraying an outward Egyptian nationalism. In the vibrant oil paintings of the aristocratic lawyer Mahmoud Said (1897–1966), I locate a visual code that echoes the transnationalism of the Mixed Courts, Said’s employer and a pioneering legal institution that adjudicated contracts between the international business communities in Alexandria. I employ this comparison to argue that late Ottoman representations of race repurpose Orientalist idioms to position the author as superior to both colonial powers and local subjects. Through this repurposing, Said visualizes multiple Mediterranean image traditions implicit in Egyptian modernism.