Saturday, November 8, 2025
The North Shore Historical Museum will host a special presentation on the influence of Japanese art on American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on July 9. The talk, titled “F. Edwin Church: Japonisme & its Enduring Legacy in American Art,” will be delivered by Justinne Lake-Jedzinak, director of education and public programs at Raynham Hall Museum.
The presentation accompanies the museum’s ongoing exhibit on F. Edwin Church, an early to mid-20th-century artist who lived in Locust Valley and whose work blends American portraiture with Japanese aesthetics.
“This is a really wonderful opportunity for the community to discover, or rediscover, this fascinating artist and his connection to our local history through his Locust Valley home,” said Museum Director Christopher Judge. “We definitely wanted a speaker related to the current exhibit about the artist F. Edwin Church, and having Justinne come in and talk is fantastic.”
Church, known for his portraits, landscapes, and lesser-known “thumb box” paintings, studied in Paris and later traveled to Haiti, where his work was influenced by his experiences alongside naturalist William Beebe. A collector of Japanese woodblock prints, Church’s work reflects a synthesis of global styles.
“He was just really, really a talented artist,” Judge said. “He studied in Paris and you’ll see the juxtaposition of his more traditional works, like landscapes and portraits, with clear Japanese influences.”
Lake-Jedzinak said her presentation will go beyond formal art history, weaving together cultural and historical threads.
“I think what I wanted to do was give a little bit of a history and context to this fascination with Japan,” Lake-Jedzinak said, “and particularly Japonisme, in terms of the way that Japanese art filtered through this Western psychological lens that goes on to influence Western artists.”
The term “Japonisme” refers to the West’s aesthetic fascination with Japanese art following Japan’s forced opening to world trade in the mid-19th century.
Lake-Jedzinak, who holds an art history PhD from Bryn Mawr College, explained that while the phenomenon’s influence on European artists like Vincent van Gogh is well documented, American artists’ engagement with Japanese aesthetics has received less scholarly attention.
“Considering the American economic role in the opening of Japan, you really see a lot of Japanese objects at these World’s Fairs,” she said, referring to the voyage by American naval officer Commodore Matthew Perry to force Japan to engage in political and economic relations with the world following centuries of isolationism. “And that doesn’t get talked about as much, as opposed to European art.”
Lake-Jedzinak’s presentation will explore not only artistic inspiration but also deeper cultural themes, including alienation, Orientalism, and how the perception of Japanese art evolved alongside American attitudes toward Japan and Asian Americans in the 20th century.
“I wanted to connect this idea of alienation and fascination with Japanese art to sort of our broader relationship with Japan,” she said. “So it’s very much history, but also our history.”
Tickets for the event are available at NSHMGC.org. Admission is $10 for museum members and $15 for nonmembers. The Church exhibit will remain on display through Aug. 17.
“It’s a very affordable ticket price to come see such an elevated presentation,” Judge said. “We really want to keep the exhibit dynamic and keep people coming back to the museum for different reasons.”
