Place Vintimille by Edouard Vuillard

Japanese, Harbor Scene, seventeenth century, ink, color, and gold on gold-leafed paper, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., F1965.22

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Folding screens had been a popular decorating element in the spacious but drafty eighteenth-century French home, where they served as a partition or baffle to direct air flow. In the first half of the nineteenth century, few screens were made, perhaps because of smaller interiors and lack of interest by contemporary artists. This changed in the 1860s, when first in London and then in Paris (at the 1867 Exposition Universelle), the Japanese showcased decorative objects, including folding screens. The multipanel Japanese screen suited the Nabi aesthetic perfectly: it required large-scale decoration ("no more easel painting!") of a household item ("an art of everyday application").