Georges Ferdinand Bigot

By Hikari Kozono

Background

Have you ever heard of a non-Japanese painter who drew not only luxury life of Japanese upper class but also ordinary life of masses? Georges Ferdinand Bigot was the French painter who depicted Japan in Meiji period. He really liked beauty of Japan and Japanese people. He was born in France in 1860. His mother encouraged him into art. At the age of twelve, he was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was trained by artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Carolus-Duran. He was interested in Japonism and Japanese art by number of collectors of Japanese art in school and he decided to work as an illustrator of newspaper to pay for the trip to Japan. 

He came to Japan at the beginning of the Meiji-era to study Japanese and Japanese art. After that he worked at the imperial Japanese army academy where he taught water color paintings to his students as an Oyatoi Gaikokuzin [Editor's note: a non-Japanese person employed by the Japanese government to teach necessary skills for Japan's modernisation] for 2 years. After he was done with his teaching job, he was allowed to stay in Japan by drawing pictures for French people in Japan. Eventually, his works became popular among those who were interested in Japanese life and against revision of treaty. His main customers were French people who lived in the foreign settlement Japan. However many of them were opposed to revision of treaty and went back to their home countries. That made Bigot worried about losing a lot of his customers. He also worked as a journalist by drawing scenes he saw but since photo technology developed at this time, his work gradually decreased. He thought it would be difficult to publish magazines freely in Japan and decided to go back to France. Before he went back to France, he divorced to his Japanese wife Masu Sano. In France he kept working as a painter for some French magazines and newspapers. He died in 1927 while he was walking in the Japanese style garden in his house.

Satirical cartoon

Although his first interest in Japanese art was Japonism, his main style of painting was satirical cartoons. Satire means to use humor to show how foolish some people’s behavior or ideas are. He mostly illustrated scenes of everyday Japanese life of masses and upper class but also ridiculed Japanese politicians, revision of treaty, and what he felt to be too much westernization in Japan in his famous satirical newspaper, Tobae. He published it for French people who lived in Japan but he put Japanese captions on his works in order to impress Japanese journalists, and sent them to Japanese newspaper publishing companies. He watched Japan’s rapid westernization with a mixture of curiosity and affection, producing a lot of pictures of the scenes he saw and tried to introduce these to the West.

Affection for Japan

While Bigot criticized too much westernization in Japan, he loved and respected Japanese tradition, culture and the everyday life of ordinary people. He especially expressed affection towards Japanese woman who are calm and obedient to men. In Tobae, he wrote “The best thing in Japan is women. Japanese women should keep being Japanese.” It is said that Bigot saw Japanese women as symbol of Japanese tradition. The picture below is the one of his satirical cartoons about westernized Japanese called “Rokumeikan’s lady”. He depicted westernized upper class Japanese women smoking in the dance hall as looking like monkeys. 

Bigot could draw pictures from the same point of view to Japanese masses. That is because he assimilated into Japanese masses easily by living outside of foreign settlement and carefully observing Japanese ordinary life. He drew various looking Japanese unlike many painters who drew only Japanese people with glasses, slant eyes and buck teeth. I guess that would change the image of Japan for those foreigners who knew only stereotype of Japanese. Some of his work didn’t receive good evaluations because he drew too ordinary scenes. However, he definitely played an important role in telling people about real Japanese life. I think his drawings will be great resources to tell people life of Japanese masses and upper class in Meiji era.


References

Simizu, I. (December 8, 2006). Bigo ga Mita Meiji Nippon. Tokyo: Ko-dan sha

Georges Ferdinand Bigot. (December 9, 2013). Retrieved on January 23, 2014. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Ferdinand_Bigot