Van Gogh, together with his brother Theo, participated in the craze of collecting cheap ukiyo-e prints. To quote The Guardian: “The artistic relationship between the European avant garde and Japan in the 19th century is one such cross-cultural flow. There’s plenty of evidence that the (mostly French) artists who laid the foundations of modernism were obsessed with the images of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and other masters who took popular, brightly coloured woodblock printmaking to a zenith of sophistication in 18th and early 19th-century Japan.” We can find evidence of this very easily, as you can see Van Gogh's ukiyo-e collection portrayed in many of his artworks, that do not necessarily have anything to do with Japan. The walls of his studio were covered by an assortment of oriental prints. A good example is his incredibly famous “Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear” from 1889, painted two years after he recreated Hiroshige’s garden scenery. Behind the artist...