In around 1900, the photographer and painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923) worked on a series of paintings based on models clad in Japanese kimono. Even in Japan at this time modern artists employed this classic theme. However, their work was not executed in a characteristic Japanese style, but in a European style strongly influenced by contemporary French painting. Young women in kimono as seen in the paintings by Breitner and the Japanese artist Seiki Kuroda (1866-1924) demonstrated this remarkable interaction never seen before between European and Japanese painting. Breitner's photographs and sketchbooks, Japanese woodblock prints and a selection of work by other Dutch painters such as Isaac Israels and Willme de Zwart complement and complete the paintings.
