Japanese Art and Western Encounters

For this three-lecture Study Day RSA Fellow Marie Conte-Helm will first chart the development of the Japanese aesthetic in painting, sculpture and the applied arts. She will also explore the impact of Zen Buddhism on Japanese culture, particularly in gardening and the tea ceremony. The lectures will include the following:

Japanese Art and the West: from Namban to Japonaiserie: This lecture will explore the artistic relationship between Japan and the West, beginning with the golden screen paintings of ‘southern barbarians’ that reflected the presence of Portuguese Jesuits in 16th century Nagasaki. Japan’s subsequent isolationism and limited contact with the outside world through the Dutch trade produced a small but significant window to the West in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was the reopening of Japan to trade in the 1850s that brought Japanese artefacts into Europe, creating an explosion of interest in Japanese art and design among artists in the West, including the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

The Art of the Japanese Garden: from Tradition to Modernity: The Japanese love of the changing seasons has manifested itself in paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens of palaces and Buddhist temples, as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens.

Programme: 10.15am welcome coffee and registration for 10.45am start

Coffee break 11.45am

Lunch break 1.05pm (a sandwich lunch will be provided)

The day will finish @3.00pm

Parking at the Focolare Centre

How to book this event:

Payment secures your place: to book email welwyngarden@theartssociety.org

Pay by bank transfer: Barclays Bank

Sort code: 20-92-54

Account no: 60945870

OR by cheque payable to The Arts Society Welwyn Garden. Post your cheque to

Helen Smith, 7 Hertford Road, Tewin, AL6 0JY. If you don’t have an email address, please enclose a SAE for confirmation

DOCUMENTS

Study Day flier Nov 2026 with booking form for website.docx

Marie Conte-Helm

Professor Marie Conte-Helm has lectured extensively on the history, arts, and culture of Asia, the Pacific, and the wider world and is an Accredited Lecturer of The Arts Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She holds higher degrees in the History of Art and in Asian Art from the City University of New York and the East West Center of the University of Hawaii and conducted her postgraduate research on Chinese Landscape Painting at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Professor Conte-Helm has served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group and Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the largest UK charity supporting links between the two countries. She has held academic posts as Reader in Japanese Studies and Director, East Asian Developments at Northumbria University, and as Head of the Japanese Studies Division at the University of Sunderland. Her book publications include The Japanese and Europe: Economic and Cultural Encounters and Japan and the North East of England: From 1862 to the Present Day. She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations. In 2019 she was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette by the Government of Japan ‘in recognition of her long-time dedication and significant contributions to the promotion of mutual understanding and cultural exchange between Japan and the United Kingdom’.