Japanese art

Japanese art
by Sadakichi Hartmann
(1904)

PREFACE

In compiling this book for publication, its purpose should be clearly understood. It is not so much a book for experts and connoisseurs too much has been written in that strain but for those persons who would like to become more intimately acquainted with Japanese Art, but have been deterred from doing so by the want of a book which would accomplish this, without obliging them to turn specialists.

This is the first history of Japanese Art which attempts to popularize the subject. I have endeavoured sincerely and sympathetically to reproduce all its leading phases and characteristics, and to show its gradual growth from the archaic period to our modern time, bearing in its evolutions such a striking resemblance to the art of Europe. As in the latter, so in the former, primitive art was a religious art, and in both the feudal period was followed by a renaissance. In the seventeenth century, the glorious epoch of the Fukugawa Shogunate corresponds to the age of Louis XV., while in the eighteenth century the classical ideal was followed by a realistic tendency in both Japan and Europe.

The great difficulty lay in knowing what to omit. Japan was very fertile in the production of artists the famous Hayashi's collection mentions over four hundred representatives of the Ukio-ye school alone, and the necessary limitations of space, among other reasons, made it impossible to exhaust the list of all those worthy of mention. I have paid slight attention to the peculiar habit of Japanese artists of changing their names several times during their professional career, as it would test the memory too severely, but invariably, except in a few cases, mentioned the name by which they were best known, Nor have I devoted much space to biographical notes and the Japanese titles of the artists' works, as they would only confuse the reader.

My sole aim was to show what the leading schools and their foremost exponents have actually accomplished, with particular stress on those of their accomplishments which appeal most strongly to our Western sense of aesthetics, and to also give the layman an opportunity of coming into touch with the infinite variety and grace of Japanese pictorialism.

I hope that this book will be welcomed by all those interested in the culture of a country where, apparently, for centuries, all worked in harmony, pursuing the same ideals and following the same methods of ornamentation, in order to produce a national art : the art of Old Japan.

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

I. EARLY RELIGIOUS PAINTING
II. THE FEUDAL PERIOD
III. THE RENAISSANCE
IV. THE REALISTIC MOVEMENT
V. THE INFLUENCE OF JAPANESE ART ON WESTERN CIVILIZATION
VI. JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE
VII. THE ORNAMENTAL ARTS
VIII. MODERN JAPANESE ART
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

CHAPTER I.
EARLY RELIGIOUS PAINTING
THE KANAOKA SCHOOL (7TH-10TH CENTURY)

GODS and goddesses, with large halos against dark blue backgrounds, strange divinities, smiling serenely, garbed in soft, flowing draperies, seated on thrones cushioned with lotus flowers, and surrounded by mythological attributes such are the jDictures that have come down to us from the earliest period of Japanese art.

Just as in Italy religious painting, before giving place to the more realistic art of the successors of Masaccio, had incarnated in the work of Fra Angelico its ideal and mystical tendencies, so Japan embodied in the decorative panels of its temples its ancient ideals of pure and native beauty.

In the eighth century, when the city of Nara was made the seat of the Mikado's government, Japan was by no means in an archaic state. The authority of the crown had become greatly extended, the power of the hereditary local chieftains broken, and a system of government instituted with prefects, who held office subject to the control of the Mikado. Learning, which in Japan meant the study of the masterpieces of Chinese antiquity, had made progress. Schools had been established, and a university, comprising the four faculties of history, of the Chinese classics, of law, and of arithmetic, was founded. This, it will be observed, was for the benefit of the official classes only. It was not until many centuries later that education reached the common people. There were also teachers, mostly Koreans, of medicine, painting, and the glyptic art. The colossal bronze statue of Buddha, and some remarkable sculptures in wood, which are still to be seen at Nara, testify to the skill which the Japanese had then acquired in the last named art.

The first written book which has come down to us in the Japanese, or indeed in any Turanian tongue, the Kojiki or " Records of Ancient Matters," was completed in 712; and at the court of Nara there existed a regular hereditary corporation of " reciters," similar to the bards of Britannia and Ireland, who recited "ancient words" before the Mikado on solemn occasions.

Of even greater importance were their achievements in architecture. This art was intimately connected with Buddhism, a cult which demanded stately temples and pagodas for its due exercise. The increasing authority of the court also required edifices more befitting its dignity, and more in consonance with the gorgeous costumes and ceremonials adopted from China, than the old sovereign palaces, which were only temporary, every Mikado having built himself a palace in a new locality.

China was in those days not as unprogressive, prosaic, sordid in temperament, and mercenary in aim as it is to-day (or as we suppose it to be). Its ancient civilization, its copious and, in many respects, remarkable literature, and a history which even then went back thousands of years, exercised a commanding influence on the surrounding countries. It played the part of Greece to the Eastern world, and there is no department of Japanese national life and thought, whether material civilization, religion, morals, political organization, language, literature or art, which does not bear traces of Chinese influence.

Beyond China lies India, which has furnished an important factor in moulding the Japanese character, namely, Buddhism. If, in regard to Japan, China takes the place of Greece and Rome, Buddhism, with its softening and humanizing influences, holds a position similar to that of Christianity in the Western world. The alternate preponderance of these two powers is an interesting feature of Japanese history, and we shall see that it has not been without effect upon its art.

The island mountaineers, in continual touch with the mainland, through numerous immigrations from Korea to Japan, which extended over centuries, received the gifts of Chinese and East Indian art and culture with open arms and utilized them to the best advantage. It gave life to their religious and philosophical ideals, to their myths, their poetry, and their art. From this, however, it must not be inferred that the Japanese have been only borrowers and copyists. If this were true, if there had been no first individuality, waiting to apprehend and restate the foreign influences, no mere change of atmosphere would have galvanized into life a new culture and a new art. The Japanese would have passed from idol to idol, with the unintelligent submission of savages, and with a benumbing indifference to principles. But Japan, in fact, has ever and anon renewed her youth; and with each outburst of creative efforts the influence of Chinese traditions has become fainter and fainter, and the qualities of the national character more and more pronounced.

The isolated situation and the elongated shape of the Japanese islands, something like that of a narrow crescent severed from the mainland, have helped the land of the rising sun to give birth to a privileged race, fit for all refinements, and gifted with the noblest and most artistic sensibility.

The oldest written documents of the Japanese, those of the eighth and ninth centuries, make no allusion to any style of pictorial art previous to the fifth century. Modern investigation, however, has pronounced a Buddhistic altar-piece in the temple of Horiuji, at Nara, the most ancient pictorial relic. The first painter mentioned was a Chinese, by the name of Shinki, who is said to have come to Japan during the reign of the Emperor Yuriaku (457-479). A little later Suki, a descendant of the Chinese emperor, Wen Ti, came to Nippon and was naturalized. "The brush of his son became famous in the days of Emperor Buretsu " (499-506, A. D.). About three hundred years later, a descendant of Shinki, Nauriu, as he is sometimes called, obtained the title of " Painter of Japan " from the Mikado.

The city of Kyoto became the centre of art. It gathered under its palace roofs and temple eaves all the art those days produced. It became the home of Buddhistic culture, and gave birth to the religious school of painting. Kukai, better known as Daishi, the " illustrious apostle of Buddhism,' 1 painted four of the seven images of high priests that have become historical. The painters Kabenari (853) and Minamoto-no-Nabu were employed in the temples, and Kavenaka executed a number of panels for the imperial palace.

The Buddhist monks chiselled from three to five thousand images every year. Chirography was raised to the dignity of a fine art. Mathematics had many expert exponents. The study of astronomy was taken up with new zeal, and the art of healing made considerable progress. The Minamotos made their age wonder at their musical gifts, and the writing of poetry became a favourite pastime with the ladies of the court.

In the ninth century the temples and c palaces were filled with renowned pictures, S both by natives and Chinese. Kanaoka, who typifies the earliest style of Japanese painting, spent long years in studying them. He became famous about 850859. In 880 he decorated the screens and walls of the Kyoto palace with the portraits of Confucius and other Chinese philosophers. A few years later he painted a serial of the ancient sages and poets of Japan for the audience-chamber of the Mikado's palace.

His sacred pictures, Japanese divinities in the beatified attitudes of India, tiptoeing on waves, wrapped in clouds, or sitting cross-legged, weighed down by heavenly meditations, are said to have been very numerous.

Very little of it, however, has been saved, nor have his successors been more successful in that respect. The secular enemy of Japanese temples, fire, has destroyed nearly all, and those few that have been preserved are altered in colour by exposure and oxidation. Only the deep clear blue, so often seen in the old Buddhist pictures, consisting of pure lapis lazuli, ground up into a pigment, is to-day as brilliant as it was of yore.

This lapis lazuli blue is really the most characteristic colour of Japan. The first vivid colour-impression a stranger receives as he walks through the streets of Yeddo or Yokohama is this peculiar blue. The top-heavy roofs of the buildings are mostly covered with blue tiles, and the same colour-note dominates in the popular costume and the sign-boards of the shops. There is, in places, a sprinkling of light blue, white, and red ; but the remainder is blue green and yellow being almost completely absent.

Of Kanaoka's painting, scarcely a dozen specimens remain. One can still be seen at the temple of Nieinai; another, representing the god Fudo, enveloped by flames, with a big wand in his hand, at the temple Dayuyi at Tokyo. Also the ancient temples at Nara and in the province of Bizen contain examples of his work. There is consequently no reason to doubt his great talent.

Various legends tell of wonderful feats accomplished by his brush. One of the best known of these stories, reminding one of Zeuxis's grapes, which were so naturally painted that the birds came to pick at them, is as follows:

" The rice-fields were nightly devastated by some unknown horse, which by day could on no occasion be tracked. One night, however, it was resolved among the peasants to lie in wait for the animal. As soon as darkness came, it did not fail to make its appearance, but it was swift and artful, showing no willingness to allow its capture. Then a desperate pursuit commenced, which seemed to be without end. The chase grows wilder and more furious. Suddenly, however, the animal disappears through a temple door, his hunters follow him ; they search everywhere around and cannot find him, until in the wall, in a celebrated picture, which hangs in its accustomed place, they see the fiery beast, who has just reentered his frame, entirely covered with foam, and still panting from his frantic race.

"The horse had been so wondrously portrayed by Kanaoka, and, indeed, with such an appearance of real life, that he became a living thing, and returned each night to liberty amongst the fields."

The only Kanaoka that can be seen outside of Japan is at the Louvre in Paris. It bears the date of the second half of the ninth century, and was brought over in 1 882 by a Japanese amateur. The museum authorities at first refused to consider it, but finally consented to admit it. It represents Dsijo, the god of benevolence. With his plump body half naked, his head shaven, his eyes half closed, he is gazing into space. It appears that he has been dreaming thus for a very long time, and that he will never rouse himself again to the sensations of reality. This being is isolated from the rest of the world ; he has entered Nirvana.

It is a work of art manifestly primitive, and yet not crude, as were, for instance, the ancient mural paintings of Egypt, which represented personages in profile while the eyes were seen as if from a front view. The drawing, although not anatomically correct, is marvellously sure and pure in its line composition. Infinitely removed from mere prettiness, from empty abstraction as from realistic curiosity, there is in its line idea an exhaustless wealth of languid grace and eastern deliciousness. One could not change a single line by a hair's breadth without changing the poise of the whole. The colouring is harmonious, reminding one slightly of faded tapestry and the deep, satiated tones of the Primitives; but that is more the work of time than of the painter's brush.

It would be extremely difficult to trace the origin of this peculiar art. It is not, as yet, genuinely Japanese; its composition is too symmetrical for that, and the flow of the lines not rapid and instantaneous enough. The Chinese painters of the Tang dynasty painted in a more rigid and pompous manner. The conception of the picture is purely Buddhistic. In Benares you may run across similar pictures, but their treatment is generally more elaborate. The Hindu perceives chiefly the multitudinous and diverse, and everything in his art is complex and exaggerated, and, for the lack of leading lines, irregular. The picture of Kanaoka, on the contrary, is as simple as early Byzantine work, and as soft and graceful as Persian painting. It is therefore possible that the beginnings of Japanese art were strongly affected by Persian influences. That there was an exchange of ideas between Persia and Japan in those remote days, is known from ancient chronicles, which report that " Persian and Japanese embassies met at the court of the Middle Kingdom."

Although rarely rising to greatness and freedom of expression, the work of this period has a never-failing tenderness and purity, a cheerfulness and sincerity, a refinement of feeling, which gives an elevated pleasure to the student who approaches these relics in a less critical than appreciative mood. They possess a living, selfwithdrawn quality of expression which gives them a peculiar religious grace not ecclesiastical unction, but the devoutness of the heart.

The painters devoted themselves chiefly to religious subjects, but among their works were also occasional portraits, figures of animals, and landscapes. Most of this work was executed on the walls, ceilings, and sliding screens (shoyi) of the Buddhistic temples. But also the more up-todate vehicles for pictorial expression, to which we have become accustomed, were already in use, namely, kakemonos (wall pictures), makimonos (scroll pictures) and gakus.

The kakemono is an oblong piece of silk, framed in stripes of brocade, and mounted on a long narrow strip of canvas with wooden rollers. The makimono is a scroll with rollers, intended to be examined by hand, and the gaku a picture framed in Western fashion.

Kanaoka originated a different style of technique for each of these mediums, fully realizing that each would need an individual treatment of its own. He founded the imperial school of Yedoreko, and had many pupils ; the most illustrious ones being, as is so often the case with Japanese artists, members of his own family, his two sons, Atima and Kateda, and his great-grandson, Hirotaka (987-1012). The latter was a priest as well as a painter, and is said to have been the first painter who depicted the Buddhistic hell. One of his compositions, on a large scale, remarkable in its power of characterization, is still shown to visitors of the temple of Tchiorakouyi, in the province of Omi.

From all over the country, particularly from the province of Hida, artisans, who were at once architects, carvers, and carpenters, came flocking to Kyoto, among them Suminawa, who surpassed his brother artists in skill to such an extent that the people of Kyoto called him " the carpenter artist of Hida." Temple after temple was built, and not less than thirteen thousand images were painted, by imperial decree, during the reign of Mikado Genwa (859- 876).

Kyoto must have been an extraordinary city in those days. Elsewhere, religion and art were only parts of the public life, at Kyoto scarcely anything else was to be seen. It occupied thousands of enthusiasts, whole streets were turned into studios and workshops, and the population of idols and images is said to have been as numerous as the human population.

The Shiba temple at Tokyo still gives a faint idea of this era of religious splendour. With erudition, a Western mind may be able to reproduce for itself the ideas and sentiments, the sequences of images and emotions which formed the soul of a Buddhistic painter or architect. We can imagine the intense impression it must have created in those days, when religion occupied every moment of man's thought, as even to-day we feel bewildered at its traces.

At first sight, one scarcely knows what all these forms represent. They only seem a confusion of lines, curving, interlaced, entangled by chance. By degrees shapes are discernible gods, genii, dragons, dolphins, animals and flowers, waves and flames, all elements thrown together, piled one over the other like a living heap. Everything seems endlessly complicated, some divinities have half a dozen heads or more, the plants extend in every direction, the flowers are entwined and twisted into each other. Everything is multiple in this inundation of divinities, in this confusion of chapels, altars, sacred lanterns, statues of animals and huge lotus flowers. This characteristic appears again in the strange architectural constructions, where one curve grows out of another, as a leaf out of a leaf; and where gods innumerable, bodies of quadrupeds and of submarine creatures, half tortoise and half monkey, abound, crushing each other, rising in quaint geometrical shapes of diverse forms.

The creation of symbols is an entire world by itself. The Japanese mind, which is otherwise so correct and well ordered, has run wild. All our mental habits are set at naught by this multitudinousness of apparitions. A sensation of bewilderment and vertigo overcomes us as we look at those endless processions of gods, divinities, mythological personages, genii and demons, at these hairy, extravagantly shaped creatures with elongated arms and legs, with enormous craniums (like Fukuruja, the god of wealth), at these eight-headed dragons twisting and writhing in vapours or flames, at these strange bodies of quadrupeds, unknown to the zoology of a Cuvier or Agassiz. Fairy castles, inhabited by wicked demons, rise fata-morgana-like in the mist, jewelornamented sea-shrines sparkle in the depth of the waves, and dragon-guarded caves open before one's astonished eyes.

The Japanese of nimble apprehension, with a turn for neatness and elegance even in his pleasures, is fond of listening to stories, and it matters little to him whether they are told to the eye or ear. Whether tattooed on the back of a foot-runner, pounded out by punch or hammer in metal, enamelled in cloisonne or niello, embroidered, inlaid, or painted, his eye delights to read the familiar, fancy-tickling lore.

The artists have taken advantage of this predilection for symbols. They have elaborated them into a sort of artistic shorthand, and classified them into groups, by means of which they are able to tell many a long story with utmost brevity. And they never tire of telling the story in the same way. Benten, a female personification of virtue, is represented as a beautiful woman playing a lute. Kwannon, the goddess of the sea, sits among jagged rocks at the shore, outwardly the type of peace and contemplation, inwardly ranging with restless eye the treacherous expanses of ocean, from whose disaster and death, by her supreme will, she rescues the helpless marines. Futen, the wind-imp, lives aloft, as he loosens and opens his ever-plethoric wind-bag, setting into motion zephyrs, breezes, cyclones, or tornadoes. Raiden, the thunder-god, busy with his drums, is always partially hidden among clouds. A number of genii with quaint, uncouth names, invariably performing the same antics, can be recognized at the first glance. One of them conjures miniature horses out of a gourd ; another floats on a hollow trunk; a third one never tires of looking at a waterfall ; a little old man is persistently depicted riding an ox ; a beggar amuses himself by emitting his spirit out of his mouth ; another one tramps about, accompanied by a toad which generally sits on his head ; and the best known of all these curious personages invariably rises from a river on the back of a winged carp.

This fairy world furnished the artist with a most fascinating repertoire, to which, with slight deviation, he has remained faithful to this very day.

Space does not permit to tell of all the creatures in Japanese mythology. In many instances, they are the epitomes, expressed in graphic symbols, of past myths, or of real struggles and conquests, the memory of which survives in imagination but not in chronology.

Japan is largely indebted to Buddhism for its art symbols. The symbolism of Gautama is like an immense vegetation, with ever-increasing branches, an inextricable network of offshoots, all growing vigorously and unrestrained, covering all of men's thoughts with its ornamental fretwork. Buddhism, however, became in Japan never as intense as in India. Its rites did not become tyrannical, and its metaI physics did not worry and confuse the / people. The Japanese, being rather sen/ timental than passionate, and more in' genious and inventive than profound, found himself incapable of leading the languid life of the Hindu. He was too active and receptive for that. His voracious appetite for knowledge did not allow him to deny his ego. The incense, which in India was stupefying, giving to scenes a certain unreality and the character as of a dream, was in Japan merely a veil, that embellished and spiritualized actuality.

The Nipponese imbued the violent emotions and overwhelming meditations of Buddhism with the gentler spirit of the myth and folk-lore of their original faith, of Shintoism, which is the simplest creed imaginable, teaching little more than reverence for the supernatural powers that created and govern the universe of man.

It is impossible to understand the evolution of the Japanese race and the individuality of their art without Shintoism, for Shintoism lives not so much in books, rites, or commandments, but in the heart of the nation, of which it is the highest emotional expression. For, underlying all the surface crop of foreign superstitions, myths, and magic, there thrilled always this mighty spiritual power, which endowed everything with its elusive subtlety and buoyant geniality, and which taught the Japanese to feel the throb of their own national life whenever foreign impact threatened to sweep away native idols and precedents.

CHAPTER II.
THE FEUDAL PERIOD
THE YAMOTO AND TOSA SCHOOLS (1000-1400)

NEXT to Buddhism, feudalism was the special patron and stimulus of the Japanese artist. A glance at the arms and armour of a feudal lord shows how his full equipment summoned most of the fine arts to the service of the warrior caste. The harness of hide and chain armour, silk and steel, brocade and lacquer; the helmet and breastplate of chased gold and silver; the dragon insignia of cast and chiselled metal; the silken banner, woven, embroidered, or painted, with the ancestral blazon; the polished triumphs of the quiver and arrow-maker's art ; the double ' bow of wood and cane; the sword-rack from the gold-lacquerer's hand; the swords, " the samurai's soul," with their hilts and handles encrusted with ornaments of precious metals; the bear-skin shoes and tiger-skin sheath ; the sharkhide grip, and curiously wrought dirk scabbard, made a panoply to which the masters of many arts contributed.

In 1050 a noble of the court, Motomitsu, founded a new national school of painting, the Yamoto, which two centuries later, when it became the official x art school, adopted the name of Tosa. It pretended to separate Japanese art from all foreign influences. Times had changed; the different branches of fine and liberal arts had made rapid strides toward perfection, and bore the impress which native influences had stamped upon them. In dancing arid music, in architecture, in the cut and pattern of garments, in literature, the Japanese had created a world which was distinct from anything foreign, and which was all their own.

Although Chinese inspiration gave birth,, to the Yamoto school, the latter developed into something entirely different from anything Chinese. In other words, it created a school of Nipponese pictorial art, in which it would be hard to find a touch of Chinese influence, as far as the choice of subject is concerned, for its principal merit lay in the faithful reproduction of Japanese feudal life.

It was a troublous period, marked by furious combats and other warlike events, of acts of vengeance, secretly planned and fulfilled by treachery. The spirit of chivalry developed itself to an extreme point, and during all this period of blood and fire, of frenzy and dark passions, the code of honour and the scorn of death arrived at that pitch, which has called forth the admiration of the universe, and which was maintained until the very last years of Old Japan.

The Yamoto-Tosa school has represented these multitudinous phases of feverish agitation, the bitter contests by sea and land, the proud mien of warriors, the tournaments, single combats, warlike adventures of generals, heroic actions and hairbreadth escapes of the warrior caste, with a host of minute details of dress, ceremonials, and pompous processions ; but it has also shown the daimyo (feudal lord) returning to his home in times of peace, applying himself in his castle gardens to all the tender and poetic inclinations, that a long period of ungoverned passion had been unable to banish from his soul.

This style has been called ornate. The writers who apply this epithet generally refer to the peculiar monotony in the representation of the human figures. No matter how vigorously they are drawn, they look like dolls and automatons, not like real living beings. They are mere flourishes, often of not more importance than the courtly honorifics which are scrawled all over the picture. There is much excuse for this. The Yamoto school was merely a means to glorify the nobility. Most of the personages depicted were personages of rank, living daimyos, or their ancestors, in delineating whose actions a more realistic style would have been offensive. The student finds it irritating and tiresome at first, but soon gets accustomed to it. In truth, such depiction was in entire consonance with the elaborate ceremonial, the imposing but cumbrous costume, and much else of the rather artificial life of the Japanese court of that time.

The painters' contemporaries, no doubt, found these pictures quite easy to understand; but since then the institutions, manners, and customs have changed so much as greatly to obscure their meaning, not only to Western students, but to the Japanese themselves. Piles of commentary by native connoisseurs have been accumulated over it, and their interpretations are often so inadequate, that writers of a later date have found it, in turn, necessary to write critical works, almost entirely taken up with correcting the errors of their predecessors.

It is almost impossible for foreigners to form an accurate opinion of this school. It is very imperfectly represented in European and American collections. True enough, pictures of the Tosa school are quite often offered for sale, but they are invariably products of a later date. Specimens of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth century can no longer be purchased, even if one were willing to pay their weight hundredfold in gold. They are in the possession of old Japanese families, and most jealously guarded. Even of the more modern exponents of the Tosa school, as Mitsunobu (died, 1525), Mitsuoky, and finally Mitsuyoshi, authentic pictures can seldom be seen.

In the eleventh century the artist families of Minamoto and Motomitsu were most prominent; in the twelfth century we encounter the names of Toba Soja, the horse painter and originator of Japanese caricature, which had such a great revival in the seventeenth century, and the two great colourists, Tamehissa and Nobuzane. In the thirteenth century Tsoutenaka became the leader of the imperial school of Tosa. His contemporaries were Takatshika, who decorated the temple of Kassouga, which was finished by his descendants in the fourteenth century, the two Buddhistic priests, Ono Sojo and Seyin, and Soumiyoshi, "painter of the imperial court."

Subjecting the work of the Yamato Tosa schools to a close analysis, one realizes at once that the Japanese principles of composition are notably different from ours.

First of all, the Japanese never uses frames. Frames serve to us as boundary lines for a pictorial representation similar to those to which we are subjected in looking at a fragment of life out of an ordinary window. The frame clearly defines the painter's pictorial vision, and concentrates the interest upon his canvas even to such an extent that all other environments are forgotten. The Japanese artist never uses solid, elevated " boundary lines " to isolate his picture, but, on the contrary, tries to make his picture merely a note of superior interest in perfect harmony with the rest of the kakemono, which, again, is in perfect harmony with the wall in which it is placed. He simply uses strips of beautifully patterned cloth to set off the picture, and endeavours to accentuate its lines and colour notes by the mounting and the momentary environments, for the Japanese does not understand our way of hanging pictures in inadequate surroundings. He subordinates everything to his inherent ideas of harmony, and is perfectly I aware that all the accessories of a room, as the colour of screens, the form of vases and lacquer-cabinets, etc., must harmonize with the picture, in order to reveal its true significance.

This has been called "decorative." "Japanese art is decorative," our critics have repeated over and over again. What a meaningless phrase ! Art, whether Japanese, European, or American, is decorative only when it has been designed to decorate something useful. But these Mitsunobus decorate nothing. The kakemonos are self-contained expressions, and only because an ordinary interior would jar with their subtle charms, the Japanese find it necessary to supply special surroundings for them. They called forth a superior style of interior decoration, but are not decorative themselves, unless the word decorative is used in a sense synonymous with beautiful.

Of course, any one familiar with Japanese art knows that it neglects, or is indifferent to, the mystery of chiaroscura, the persuasiveness of linear perspective, and the logic of local colour. And yet they convey depth of space, an effective scale of relative importances in colour, and the purity of atmosphere, as well as we do.

Their neglect of linear perspective is a most peculiar trait, for one cannot conceive such close observers as the Chinese and Japanese being unable to see, for instance, that a road appears to diminish as it recedes from the eye. Why is this ? That intricate laws of perspective want study, that even the vanishing lines of two sides of a house may not be perceptible to the ignorant, may be possible, but the merest child sees that a road is narrower at the end than at the beginning where he stands. Then, again, although the anatomy of each bird, beast, and fish is as closely observed as to its general characteristics, distance is indicated only by diminishing the objects depicted ; and the armour, and each detail of the costumes of the soldiers a mile off, are painted with as much minuteness as that on the men who are in the immediate foreground.

Another striking peculiarity is the lack of form knowledge. The Japanese painters, not only those of the Yamoto-Tosa school, but to this very day, have never drawn a proper human face or body, as we understand it. Take, for instance, a warrior or court lady, by Mitsunobu. The representation undoubtedly has its merits. It is, despite the frugality of its colouring, an example of most perfect flesh painting, " after its kind," which for modelling reminds one of Holbein. There is all the apparent flatness, the want of strange effects of light and shade, and the intense individuality of expression, and yet the drawing, precise as it is, is neither anatomically nor proportionately correct. This seems the more astonishing to us as the Japanese men and women are by no means shy in appearing naked, which, after all, offers the best opportunity for studying the human form. It must be noted, however, that their religious belief regards the body as a vile carcass, of no worth whatever, destined to rot and waste away. This, in connection with canons as rigid and indisputable as those of the ancient Greeks, which exactly told the painter how to paint, may explain much of this mannerism in the eccentric drawing of drapery, or the features of the human face. In treating the folds of a woman's dress, for instance, they had to make them either " undulating as the waves of the sea," or "angular as the edges of rocks," etc.

European art, both painting and sculpture, went through a continued course of development. Naturally, I mean development as regards knowledge of anatomy, of form, of colour, and of general technique. As regards sentiment, perhaps there was more decadence than progress, arriving from a change in feeling and in faith, without a corresponding change in subject. The Greeks, as the Italians, passed through the same phase of art, continuing to produce subjects long after all faith in them had passed away. Hence, the decadence in Greek art in the early centuries of our era, and in Italian art in the seventeenth century. But as soon as men perceived their error, and determined to paint what was around and about them, art revived and their technique improved. The Flemish schools, the Spanish, and later on the French and English, even our American school, all show progress in that respect. In Japan there had been nothing analagous to this. The subjects have been changed, but the technique has always remained true to certain rules and regulations ; and it would be difficult to state whether the Tosa, Kano, or Ukio-ye masters were the greater draughtsmen or colourists.

With this, I do not wish to imply that the Japanese artist does not study from nature. On the contrary, he has derived all the fundamental ideas of his pictorial conceptions, so different from ours, from a close study of nature. The Japanese are on by far more intimate terms with nature than we are, and " nature walks " have always been one of the most popular means of instruction in the education of their children. But the artist never drew directly from nature. He merely looked at objects, absorbed all their peculiarities, and then went back to his studio to combine the facts of nature with certain conventional modes of treatment, in his opinion best suited to the purpose.

In the thirteenth century, flower, animal, and still life painting came into fashion. The Tosa masters never learned to equal the Chinese in the faithful reproduction of the hair of a beast, of the down of feathers, the veining of petals, or the dust on a butterfly's wing, but they gave play to a fancy of their own, and added charms, which the miniaturists of the Celestial Kingdom had never dreamt of.

In the beginning, satisfied with closely and minutely imitating natural objects, and creating a pictorial illusion, as far as that is possible without the application of light and shade, they soon strove for a less conventional treatment, which, several centuries later, developed into the decorative style, absolutely individual with the Japanese, which rather suggests than imitates the external facts of nature. At the start, their attempts were very feeble, almost childish. They were seriously handicapped by the literature of regulations, regular codes laid down by savants, as to how subjects should be represented, but the idea that the movement of plants, their peculiar way of standing in the air, etc., were more important for the general appearance of objects than a mere study of form and texture, gradually induced them to break away from formalism. They tried to imbue a fragment of nature, uninteresting in itself, with a poetical idea. In the representation of a basket of mountain flowers, for instance, they ventured to introduce the poetic suggestion of a mountain in the background. These experiments resulted, many centuries later, in the combination of panoramic views with ostentatious details, as practised by Okyo and other masters, who used the delicate structure of a flower or plant as foreground, and connected the latter with the landscape behind it by a few broad effects or a wilful emptiness.

If a Japanese wishes to give the impression of an orchard in spring, he does not paint the whole scene as a Western painter would do, but simply suggests it by a twig in delicate bloom, with the graceful silhouette of a waning moon behind it.

The Tosa school gave the first impulse toward this conciseness of expression, which is also a characteristic of Japanese poetry, which has reached in the haikai, a stanza consisting of seventeen syllables, its extreme limit of brevity.

Although no great qualities can be claimed for these poetical forms, it must be admitted that the Japanese poets have made the most of their slender resources. It is wonderful what melody and true sentiment they have managed to compress within these narrow limits. In the same manner the Japanese painters learnt to produce a truly admirable effect by a few dexterous strokes of the brush. The masters of the Tosa school, however, recognized this only theoretically. They had not yet the calligraphic dexterity to practise it.

The school has become famous for its conscientious details, the elegance and beauty of its lines and touches, for its brilliant and harmonious colouring, which reminds one of Persian emaille painting.

The brightest and the strongest hues, red, blue, green, white, and gold, are employed in all their intensity. The greater part of the space to be covered is broken up by variegated daubs and patches, while some broad mass of leading colour is always interposed at definite intervals to impart solidity to the whole.

Their works, virile and melodramatic as they are at times, are full of grace and beauty and seem the natural manifestation of serene, contented, and happy minds. Their gift of colour, fragrant and fragile as plum and cherry trees in bloom, is all their own. And it is this exquisite gift of theirs which constitutes the principal charm of their work. Fine and true though their feeling for beauty and flow of lines will always be found, their composition is somewhat awTcward. But in colour they never strike a false note. In their exquisite blending of tints, one can easily read the delight in all loveliness which characterized that particular part of their history, shadowed only now and then by strange misgivings one feels in their work, when they depict the blood-stained life of the daimyos. In these pictures the artists seem conscious of the doom that hung over the feudal time, and this knowledge clouded their delineations, giving them a strange fascination that is irresistible.

Religious painting had not ceased to exist, but Buddhism had greatly changed. It aspired to worldly power, and the three thousand monasteries which at this time dotted the slopes of Hiyeisan, a mountain northeast of Kyoto, were a very material embodiment of Buddhist influence. Not content with mere spiritual weapons, the inmates of these establishments were always ready on the smallest provocation to don armour over their monastic frocks and troop down to the streets of Kyoto, to place their swords on whatever scale of the politics of the day seemed to them most expedient. A priesthood to whom a practical knowledge of war and warlike accomplishments was vital was not conducive to the production of important religious paintings.

The Japanese nobleman, moreover, had more than a mere tolerance for other creeds. Although in the main either a Buddhist or Shintoist, he also took more than an ordinary interest in the Confucian moral philosophy and even in Taoism, that mass of vague speculation, attributed to Laotze and his disciple Cliwang Chow.

The primitive style of Kanaoka consequently languished. Temples, of course, were built ; all sorts of mythological creatures carved out of huge blocks of wood, and colossal figures of Buddha constructed, but the painters, either retained by the daimyos or roaming about in a vagrom way from castle to castle, began to look at Buddhism in a somewhat cynical way, and depicted the deities in a rather disrespectful manner. They became satirists, like Lucian in his " Dialogues of the Gods."

The castle of the feudal lord became to the artist what the monastery had been before. He became one of the daimyo's retainers, and was clothed, fed, and lodged by him, the only return expected from him being the production of the best work in his power. And, although the daimyos often fought for years at a time in the very streets of Kyoto, setting fire to temples and reducing to ashes many of the art treasures which were once the glory of the ancient capital, the artists could work in perfect security behind the castle walls, and dream their twilight dreams, all fragrant with the flowers of nature and art. The Japanese artist led an ideal existence, simply living for art's sake. Many of their greatest painters may be said to have known nothing of money.

With this golden leisure and freedom from care, their power was increased tenfold; and thus has been developed not merely a patience altogether marvellous in the most minute and complete finishing of every detail, not merely a technical excellence seldom equalled and never surpassed, but a power of delineating life, and a sensitiveness to decorative and emotional suggestion, which placed the Japanese in the front rank of the artists of any age or country.

CHAPTER III.
THE RENAISSANCE
THE KANO SCHOOL (1400-1750)

IN misty mornings in spring, the Dai-mouji Mountain, which stands just back of the " Silver Temple " at the east side of Kyoto, looks exactly like a massive silver hieroglyphic. The mountain bears upon its slope a peculiar artificial landmark, resembling the Chinese character signifying " dai," or great, formed by a series of excavations, in which the snow still lingers, while the surface of the mountain is bare.

This colossal character of white snow might readily be taken as a symbol of Japanese art, for the manipulation of the pointer's brush is strictly calligraphic. Japanese writing in itself is a sort of painting. Some of the characters of the written language resemble the trees and bridge posts as drawn by certain artists. And do not the gateways of the Japanese temples these quaint constructions, consisting of two pillars that support horizontally a lintel with projecting ends and a tie beam remind one involuntarily of some colossal Chinese letter, which has been painted against the sky with four sweeps of vermilion by a giant brush ?

The child, learning to write, draws these pictorial signs with a brush, holding the paper, which is absorbent, in his hand. Thus, the whole arm works, motion being got from the shoulder, the elbow, ar d the wrist alike. One can readily imagine what influence this method of writing has in fostering the power of a child to seize the outlines of natural form. It learns unconsciously to draw with a free hand. Our children learn to write with a hard pen or pencil; and with the same hard point they make their first attempts at drawing. The young art student suddenly finds a yielding brush placed in his hand. No wonder that he is awkward, and in its manipulation absolutely incapable of competing with a Japanese, who already as a child has learnt the value of touches.

The calligraphic dexterity, as displayed, for instance, in the cranes of Saitoshy, is an inheritance with the Japanese artist. His fingers work almost mechanically, as he delineates a flying bird, the vegetation of mountains, the colours of the sea, the shape of branches, or the spring-burst of flowers. Generations of skilled workmen have given him their cunning, and revive in the marvels of his brush work. What was conscious effort in the beginning became unconscious, instinctive, almost automatic, in later centuries.

At the close of the fourteenth century, the Chinese were still the foremost painters of the Eastern world. China reached its prime during the Sung dynasty (961-1280). It had been an era as conspicuous for the development of great individualities, innovating statesmen, constructive philosophers, inspired poets, and original artists, as that of any period of European civilization.

No wonder that a great wave of Chinese influence passed over the Japanese islands, deeply affecting it in every conceivable way. Not only laws and sciences, but the material civilization, and, most of all, the thoughts of the nation, as expressed in its philosophy and literature, profited by Chinese teaching and example.

Inspired by the great artists of Hangchow, a new school, with the aim of technically equalling the Chinese masters, was founded, destined very soon to surpass the former native schools in merit and renown. In Kanaoka's time, the painters had devoted themselves principally to the representation of gods and heroes ; during the feudal period warfare and still life had become the leading subjects; now animals and landscapes came more in evidence.

The figure painter, Cho Densu (13511427), also known by the name Meitshyo, and his two pupils, Josetsou and Shubun, who in turn had two pupils, Sotan and Kano Massanobu, were the principal instigators of the movement. As each of these men taught, there existed for a few years, as rivals of the Tosa school, almost as many distinct schools. But, if the chiefs differed from one another in the nature of their genius, they had adopted the same manner, the same subjects, the same general principles ; so that they soon became blended into one school the school of Kano. The leading characteristic of this school was the absolute subordination of colour to design.

In the beginning, the school was devoted entirely to black and white, with an occasional use of bistre or some other faint colour as uniting half-tone. In its later development, it made use of colour, and tried to rival the Tosa painters in a lavish application of gold and brilliant tints. It can even be said that in Yeitaku and Korin the Kano school produced colourists almost as great as Nobuzane in the thirteenth century.

Cho Densu, a Kyoto priest, was the great revivalist of the Kanaoka school. He devoted himself entirely to sacerdotal art. He was one of the few Japanese painters who attempted pictures of a heroic size. His " Death of Sakia," still existing at one of the Kyoto temples, and copied innumerable times by artists to this very day, measures about nine by thirteen feet. It is considered by native critics as one of the masterpieces of ancient art, and favourably impresses one by the breadth of its composition, the firmness of its brush work, the harmony of its colour, and the grandeur of its sentiments. Cho Densu's work, although inferior to Kanaoka in line conception, is as profound and highly intellectual in achievement as anything ever produced by a Japanese brush. It almost rises to sublimity.

Very little is known of Josetsou, except that he was a Chinese by birth, and a priest for many years previous to his taking up landscape painting as a profession.

Of his fellow student, Shubun, on the other hand, many examples have remained, which prove him to be a great technician. He abolished the use of the fine, round, and pointed brushes of the Tosa school, and constructed brushes with broader and flatter surfaces. He had a powerful, vital touch, full of personality. His line, a direct outcome of the study of Wutaotz, celebrated as the greatest painter of China, varied with each object drawn, without losing the strength and boldness of his own individuality. He tried to suggest with every stroke of his brush the leading line-characteristics of houses, rocks, trees, marsh grass, etc.

His pupils, Sotan and Kano Massanobu, perfected his methods, and Saomi wrote a hand-book on painting which has become classical.

Another great man of this movement, according to native authority, was Sesshin (1421-1507). A biographer informs us that : " He did not follow in the footsteps of the ancients, but developed a style peculiar to himself. His power was greatest in landscape, after which he excelled most in figures, then in flowers and birds ; and he was also skilful in the delineation of oxen, horses, dragons, and tigers. In drawing figures and animals, he completed his sketch with a single stroke of the brush, and of this style of working he is considered the originator."

He painted on white silk panels, toned down to a light brown tinge, exclusively with Chinese ink. His work is remarkable for leaving certain portions of his pictures entirely unpainted. He arrived at great perfection in this style, and often, as, for instance, in the neck and breast of a bird, gave the illusion of modelling by means of an entire absence of touches. In his winter landscapes, he made use of the silk ground itself to give a faithful rendering of the whiteness of snow, covering trees and roofs.

In his earlier years he went to China, and, full of zeal, sought a teacher among their most renowned masters. His dexterity astonished the Chinese artists, who found but little to teach him. He was ordered to the court at Peking to paint before the emperor, and, to the great surprise of the sovereign, he produced upon a piece of silk a dragon, surrounded with clouds, with three or four splashes of his brush. Disgusted with the instruction he had received, he returned to his native land, resolved to take in the future lessons only from the mountains, rivers, and trees. And it is especially in mountains, rivers, and trees that his disciples followed his lead. His line is angular and rugged, vibrating with the nervous force of the artist's hand.

The subjects preferred by the Kano masters were the portraits of legendary personages, romantic landscapes, soi-disant Chinese, and animals and plants, generally endowed with a symbolical or emblematic meaning. Saints of all orders find their place in the works of the Kano school, but instead of mystic beings, throned in ethereal regions, they show us a succession of gods, belonging to the common round of life, or affecting asceticism which appears far from austere.

The Kano school at the start had no reformatory aspirations. It was simply meant for a return to the religious period. Cho Densu endeavoured honestly to paint in the manner of the early Buddhistic painters, and to see life through primitive eyes. But the school, as is generally the case with revival movements, proved to be a renaissance.

The fifteenth century, when Sesshin and Kano Massanobu painted, is considered the purest, the most classical period of Japanese art. It was one of those supreme occasions when the human soul, raising itself for a brief period to rare heights of fusion, has struck out at a white heat for the revelation of pure art. The opponents of this school, of course, reproached it for the almost superstitious respect its artists paid to Chinese art and Chinese civilization in general. But these painters' adoration for China was merely a pretext for their own idealization of art. They had their own ideals ready in their minds, but found it necessary to fortify themselves with a code of precise rules, and, as China could furnish them, they went to the painters of the Hangchow period for inspiration and instruction. And there is no doubt that, without the Chinese influence, that vigour of lines, that spontaneity of touch, which reveals the painter more plainly than the object painted, which appeals to the manlier side of one's nature, which, like a simple verse of Omar, knocks the gate of the kingdom of mystery ajar, so that one's imagination might tiptoe and take a peep into the mystic beyond, would have been dwarfed in the Japanese painter.

Let me now try to initiate my reader into a few of the technical mysteries of the artist's profession, which is the leading characteristic of this school. The Japanese painter easily could carry all his worldly artistic goods in a handkerchief, and has done so invariably, even to this very day.

There is first a small roll made of fine bamboo, which serves as porte-crayon, in which are brushes of various sizes; then the Chinese ink-dish ; three or four small bowls in which the colours are mixed, one for each colour; two or three small parcels containing fresh supplies of paint; two large bowls of water, a plate, and a piece of paper laid out upon the floor. In the parcels are some small sticks of brown and indigo, some red dye, a lump of gamboge, and a quantity of small white pelkits. - These colours, with the Chinese ink, make up the palette. The white is only mixed just before being used, and considerable skill is necessary both in the mixing and the use of it. The pellets are first crushed and ground very fine with a small glass pestle, and then mixed with melted gelatine, the whole, with a little water, being afterward ground and rubbed into a thick paste till all traces of grit have disappeared. The pigment thus prepared is quite useless when it once becomes dry and hard ; it has, therefore, to be mixed afresh for every picture; but to the care with which it is prepared are due both its brilliancy and its permanence in the picture. This durability is essential, as the pictures are kept rolled, and it is only after very many years of rolling and unrolling that the white begins to show signs of perishing or peeling. The power of manipulating white, not in simple body colour only, but in thin washes, is an inheritance from the Chinese. Those who are familiar with the oldest Buddhist pictures will be familiar with the filmy veil which often falls from the head of a divinity, and is produced by the thinnest possible wash of white laid on over all the other colours, without blur or running of any kind.

The paper is slightly toned, and made in small pieces about the size of a sheet of foolscap. If larger pieces are required they are joined with rice paste. It is in the rapidly absorbent quality of this paper that Japanese artists have found most of their difficulties, and it is from the methods adopted to overcome these difficulties that most of the essential characteristics of Japanese art have sprung. The absorbence is midway between blotting and unglazed papers; what has to be done must, therefore, be done quickly; corrections are almost impossible.

Also washes of colour as executed by our Western water-colours are out of the question. But the Japanese gets at gradations of colour in his own way. The peculiar shape of the brushes enable a supply of water to be held in reserve at the hinge, the full tone required only being taken up at the point. The side of a feather, for instance, is being drawn. Directly the gradation is wanted, a little pressure brings the thicker part of the brush into play, the water escapes, and shades off the tone to the required lightness. A regular trick is used in painting a melting mist around the moon. To get this, the circle of the moon is struck in with a compass, one leg of which holds a brush full of water. This is passed around the silhouette of the moon, whereby any hard line is prevented. The fleecy cloud which obscures the moon is obtained by first damping the whole sheet of paper, and putting on washes of water, colour, and again water before it is quite dry.

It is obvious, however, that with these methods very little colour can be used, and thence come these pale, misty moonlight effects with which we are so familiar.

The semi-absorbent quality of the paper has compensated for the many difficulties which are set in the artist's path in two ways: to the lines, drawn with a brush full of Chinese ink, it imparts a certain crispness, and, moreover, it compels rapid work, which necessity has produced a certainty of touch and a dexterity of execution, wherein lies much of the secret of the motion which Japanese artists so greatly excel in portraying.

The pictures are, however, invariably painted on silk prepared for work by being rubbed over with a fine powder, which makes the surface very much like that of the paper.

The brushes are, of course, of various sizes, but those with which the ordinary black and white pictures are painted are about the thickness of the little finger at the hinge, with hair about an inch and a quarter long and running to an exceedingly fine point. This peculiar construction allows the finest as well as the broadest strokes to be executed with the same brush.

And now, having described his materials, let us see the artist at work. The paper lies on the floor, with weights at the four corners. The artist kneels in front of it. The usual position of the brush is perpendicular to the paper, the thumb pressing it firmly against the first joint of the second finger and the third joint of the first finger close to the middle joint. The first finger itself presses lightly against the brush and helps to guide it; the little finger rests on the paper, and the left hand is placed below the right wrist as a rest; when a freer play of the arm is necessary, both rests are withdrawn. The brush is held very long, the fingers being usually three to four inches from the paper; when the strokes are very bold, the brush is often held at the end. The axis of the lines is therefore either at the point of the little finger, the wrist, the shoulder, or the knee. In drawing large subjects, the whole body is moved and becomes the reticulated joint, working from the knee as a fulcrum.

The students did not draw from nature, but devoted day in and day out during an apprenticeship of eight years to a most exacting study of old masters. The student began by making a careful study of some picture, by a Chinese master like Mokke or Bunjin Jen, after which he made several copies from his own copy, and, when he had made himself thoroughly acquainted with every detail and every stroke of the original, he made a final copy which was submitted to the teacher's judgment. Then the next picture was treated in the same way; then the next, and so on.

These repetitions of the same subject may be vain from view-point of originality, from the view-point of accuracy their value can hardly be overrated. This method of instruction has been carefully worked out to the smallest detail, and made subject to rule. For every line in a bird's back or claw, a certain position of the hand and a certain inclination of the brush have been found to be necessary, and they must be learnt, acquired, and remembered. The curves and swells cannot be accomplished in any other way. For every broad mark in the body or the wing, a certain intensity of colour at the point of the brush and a certain quantity of water to be held in reserve at the hinge, a certain pressure of the ringers holding the brush and a certain motion of the entire arm, are necessary, or the colour will not shade off properly, and there will be a series of hard smudges instead of animated feathers. There is no other way of getting these feathers, just as there are no other lines which will tell so simply of the bird's flight in the air. And as the desired accuracy, to which a hairbreadth's deviation of a line proves fatal, can only be acquired by practice, the long apprenticeship entirely devoted to a free application of the brush explains itself. But when these and a hundred of other minute instructions are learnt and remembered and he has to learn and master them until every trick and device lias become second nature to his hand the student may paint a bird cleaving the air as well as any master.

There is no doubt that such minute training lops off ruthlessly all buds of genius but the very strongest, and that the artists who survive are few and far between. But those who do survive are veritable wizards of the brush. No European master, to be sure, can vie with them in putting so much information, life, and humour into the same space of paper with so small an expenditure of labour. None of our water-colourists can realize with a few marvellous strokes, dabs, and sweeps of the brush such astonishing resuits as Motonobu (the son- of Massanobu), Sauraku, Yeitoku, Takonobu, known as the father of three great painters, Tanyu, Naonobu, and Yasunobu, better known as Yeishi, and Tchiokuvan, whose delineations of birds, in pure black and white without any gradations, remind one involuntarily of Diirer's woodcuts.

Motonobu (1452-1490) was a most vigorous manipulator of the brush. He could give the effect and general appearance of any object with a few strokes of the brush, but each stroke tells, and each curve has a meaning. This capacity of expressing much with very little apparent effort is shown in the figure of a bird perched on a melon. A few strokes express the turn of the bird's body, and the shape of the fruit.

But if any man should ever be envied for the felicity and precision with which he handled his brush, it is Tanyu (1601-1674), the greatest technician of them all. He was the impressionistic delineator of horses, of dragons, submarine creatures, and various beasts of the mythological zoology. His masterpiece, four lions painted in Chinese ink on wooden panels, can still be seen at the temple of Nikko. Also his two coloured dragons at the principal gateway of the same temple have aroused the admiration of many a connoisseur. A collection of his principal works, published the end of the eighteenth century, gives a fair idea of his remarkable talent. He was a virtuoso of curves. His style can be recognized at the first glance by the peculiar slap-dash quality of his line. The suggestiveness of his line, sometimes ranging from hairbreadth to the width of an inch, has never been surpassed. He could draw a horse in three or four sweeps of the brush ; the body of a crane he realized in two strokes, and he seldom used more than three or four dozen lines to finish an entire picture.

Japanese art was now in the possession of many of its leading characteristics, as the calligraphic dexterity of brush work, the wilful neglect or exaggeration of detail, the grotesque division of space, and the economic manipulation of backgrounds which apparently look empty, and yet enhance the pictorial aspect to a rare degree. Also another quality, perhaps the most important of all, namely, the principle of repetition with slight variation, had successfully been put into use.

This peculiarity of composition possesses the principal elements of pictorial art. Its object is not to execute a perfect /imitation of reality (only bad works of art do that) or a poetic resemblance of life (as our best painters produce), but merely a commentary on some pictorial vision, which sets the mind to think and dream. If the Japanese artist wants to depict a llight of cranes, he draws a half-dozen or more, which at the first glance look alike, but which on closer scrutiny are each endowed with an individuality of their own. He foregoes perspective and all other expedients ; he simply represents them in clear outlines in a diagonal line or sweeping curve on an empty background, and relies for his effect upon the repetition of forms. A Western artist would expand this, at least, into a picture with a landscape or cloud effect as background; to the Japanese artist, working in the narrow bounds prescribed by custom and tradition, all such attempts would appear futile ; he knows that such an event cannot be expressed more forcibly than by simply depicting the objects with only a slight variation in their representation. The first form introduces us to the subject, its appearance and action; the second accentuates the same impressions and heightens the feeling of reality by a slight variation in its appearance and action; and every following form, resembling at the first glance a silhouette, is simply a commentary upon the preceding one; and all together represent, so to say, a multiplication of the original idea.

And in the same manner as they treat lines and masses, they vary colour schemes, which often resemble each other, but are, nevertheless, endlessly varied in shade and line. And not only the elements of composition are guided by the law of repetition, but also the creative power of the artists. As inexhaustible as it seems, one will find that they have always treated certain lines of subjects. For instance, they have painted a crow sitting on a snow-covered fir branch, with the full moon behind, a thousand times; but every painter who has handled the subject has tried to lend it a new individuality. Only the subject remains the same. Treatment and conception are invariably changed with the personality of the artist. They have realized, by a never tiring study of variation, that a beautiful idea always remains a beautiful idea, and that it takes as much creative power to lend a new charm to an old theme as to produce and execute an apparently new one, which, after all, may prove an old one.

The year 1603 marks the beginning of that wonderful political organization known as the Takugawa Shogunate. For years the local nobles, or daimyos, defying all control by the government, had engaged in continual struggles with one another for lands and power, and a lamentable condition of anarchy had been the result Takigawa Yyeyosu, the greatest warrior and statesman Japan has seen, after a sharp struggle, which ended in the defeat of his opponents, in the battle of Sekighara, finally succeeded to the supreme authority, and caused himself to be appointed Shogun (i. e* regent) by the puppet Mikado of the day.

By the organization of this remarkable system of feudal government, the dynasty of Shoguns which lasted until 1867, under which the nation enjoyed peace and prosperity for two and a half centuries, Yyeyosu solved for his day and country the problem which will occupy politicians to the end of time, of the due apportionment of control and local authority. At no previous period of Japanese history was the power of the central government more effectively maintained in all essential matters, although in other respects the daimyos were allowed a large measure of independent action. Under this regime Japan increased amazingly in wealth and population, and made great progress in all the arts and civilization.

As a consequence, the new capital of Yedo (Tokyo) rose rapidly to importance. To the beginning of the seventeenth century, the old city of Kyoto, which had always enjoyed the presence of the Mikado and his palaces, had been considered the centre of culture and of art, but now Yedo became her rival, and gathered unto her all the fruits of learning, of literature, and of art. The daimyos and their retainers, the samurai, compelled by regulation to live a part of the year in Yedo, increasing its population to at least a million, materially helped to bring about this displacement of the artistic and literary centre of Japan. They were all fond of luxury and an easy-going life, ever hungry for delights of the eye and elegant pleasures, and as it is only necessary in this accommodating world to express a need when somebody provides a means to satisfy it, the new city was soon overcrowded with curio-shops, workshops of artisans, and artists' studios.

Kyoto continued to be a place of some artistic activity, it even developed an exclusive " palace literature and art," but Yedo attracted to itself all the rising talents of the country, and became the cradle of a new form of art. The higher degree of civilization, which was rendered possible by an improved administration and a more settled government, included a far more widely extended system of education than the country had ever known before. And not only were the humbler classes better educated, the culture, which for so many years had belonged almost exclusively to the noble and knightly class, had worked its way into the humbier huts, and had created in the masses a certain appreciation of the beautiful. They also had grown more prosperous, and could indulge in the luxury of buying books and works of art.

Artists no longer addressed themselves exclusively to the cultured class, but the people generally. The result was a singular form of art, vacillating between new and old ideals, trying to please the common people by the introduction of democratic elements, without offending the nobler class of society.

They began to paint pictures of a popular tendency, like the " Hundred Cranes " and " Thousand Carps," showing us cranes in every imaginable position, flying, fixed in the air, standing, eating, swimming, and all faultlessly drawn, or a shoal of carp, as one might see it through the glass of an aquarium, floundering about it in all kinds of positions, twisting and twirling about, and fading away in the distant water.

They also entered the field of caricature, and endowed animals and inanimate objects with human features. They represent tortoises as warriors on a march. Delicious is the rendering of the clumsy reptiles' efforts to run. They show us a group of frogs, out on a picnic. Some have on hats, some carry fans, while others smoke and dance and otherwise disport themselves. Another picture shows us a cat, tortured by rats, or a man dragged in bonds by wolves, hares, rabbits, etc. Their fox pictures are also very quaint, parodying as they do a Japanese marriage and other functions of social life.

It was, however, not before the end of the seventeenth century that regular schools began to be formed which broke away from the traditionary teachings of the followers of the Tosa and Kano schools.

The age of the Takugawa Shogunate could pride itself on having lent encouragement to three distinct schools of painting, and a fourth one that just came into evidence. The Buddhistic school had no great exponent, but there were still many men who adhered to Kanaoka's and Cho Densu's principles.

The Tosa school was represented by the miniaturist Mitsuoky, (1616-1691), the greatest flower painter Japan has produced. His ideals were purity of line and purity of colour. His flower pieces were models of elegance, and invariably endowed with some tender sentiment. The austerity of mediaevalism has yielded to the sweetness and fancy of a triumphal epoch, losing thereby nothing of its dignity, but gaining something of gentleness and tranquillity.

The Kano school was in its prime. Tanyu was famous all over Japan. His brother, Naonobu (1607-1651), laboured for years to combine energy with delicacy of touch, and at last succeeded. He is one of the most individual of all the artists of his race. His picture of a monkey groping for the sun is one of the best known pictures of Japanese art. Yeishi, the youngest man of the illustrious Takanobu family, painted women with a greater refinement and a more thorough understanding of drapery than they had ever been painted before.

What a flapping parody in comparison is the grace of a Japanese lady in the canvas of one of our latter day artists, christened " La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine ! "

A renown equal to that of these three men was enjoyed by Shioukada, also called Shojo, who died in 1639. He favoured large compositions and pale, flat tints. His washes were remarkably pure and expressive. They sometimes cover a surface of several square feet, and yet are perfectly even, melting almost unnoticeably into the background. His works have been published in two volumes in Yedo, 1804.

In the fifteenth century the artists had created a new style, while thinking they were imitating classic models, but it was not before the latter part of the sixteenth when the real renaissance set in and the classical ideal was followed by a realistic tendency.

The sixteen years of the Genroku period (1688-1703) which have been compared to the age of Pericles, the days of Louis XV., and the Venetian prime, were the heyday of Japanese art and culture. Art and culture seemed to have everything their own way. There were masters in every branch of art. Bashio wrote his poetry; Chikamitsu, who has been compared to Shakespeare, had his plays performed in Yedo. Pottery was represented by Ninsei and Kenzan, architecture by the great Zingaro, sculpture by Ritsuo, and the metallurgic art by Somin.

The great genius of the period was Korin (1661-1716). He was one of the first to break away from the classical ideals. There was about him not a trace of arbitrary rules or traditions. Whatever he imagined he produced immediately in a wild improvisatore fashion without troubling himself how it was done, as long as it produced an effect. He was a great colourist. His sketches in black and gold (gold powder being sprinkled over certain parts of the drawing), a style introduced by Sotatsu fifty years before, are wonderful feats of execution. Although best known as a painter, he also achieved great triumphs as a lacquerer. He has to be classed in the list of those eccentric geniuses who, by the very excess of their individuality, fail to put their real talent at its full value.

Of an equally radical but more practical mind was Okyo (1732-1795), the painter of morning mists, of cranes, fish, little dogs, stags and apes. He established the so-called "natural" in Shijo school about 1750. He was a great stickler for truth, resolved to paint directly from nature, without trying to embellish his work. But he could not escape his genius ; he was a poet by nature, and his interpretations became poetical even against his will. His compositions possess a charming delicacy, a gracious ease, a naturalness of attitude ; but they are conceived in a superficial manner ; neither he nor his school were ever able to represent the inner life, or the profound character of the subjects they attempted.

The strength and violent passions, which had stamped the earlier art, were in it lacking. Okyo and his pupils shunned the sterner moods of nature, as well as the deep and tragic elements of human life. But what of pure soul there should be in infinite delicacy breathed through their work. They drew again attention to the infinite fertility of landscape motives that hide among the pine-topped islands; they proved that in the facile Japanese brush lay still unsuspected tendernesses.

' The Daijo temple of Kameizan was entirely decorated by him and his pupils. Every room carries out a certain idea. The "room of mountain and water" is devoted to streams and mountains. The wall is of gold ground and rusty russet. The breath of nature seems to come ringing through the pine-needles, and the purity of the sparkling waters seems to wash all vulgar elements out of the human soul. In the "room of agriculture," he painted upon sixteen panels the history of rice from the sowing and planting in the field to the harvest and the gathering. In the "peacock room," he lavished all his skill on a pair of peacocks under two pinetrees. A native critic said of this decoration : " No king, I do not care how great and rich in power he be, could cram under a crown one-tenth of the imperial airs and splendour which Okyo painted into the majestic carriage of these two peacocks." The " room of ambassadors " is the joint work of the two favourite pupils of Okyo, Yamanato Shurei and Kamaoka Kirei. On one side a warrior's messenger approaches the king's castle, on the other the queen is granting an audience to the ladies of the embassy.

How seriously Okyo, after all, took his art, is shown by the following story, known to every educated person in Japan, and with which I conclude this chapter, as it is typical of the patience and perseverance which Japanese artists, particularly of this period, have always demonstrated in the pursuit of their vocation :

The favourite resort of the wild boars was also the favourite haunt of Okyo. The cave in the rock, which the stream had dug with its crystal chisel, found itself, on a fine summer day, converted into a nature-made studio for the master.

Day after day, he sat in his cave-studio, always looking out at the tremulous patterns which the sun, sieving through the pine-needles, wove upon the ground and on a boar, all covered with mud, taking his siesta in a royal fashion. For hours and hours he watched the sleeping boar, and, finally, on a fine summer twilight hour, he gathered his courage and took up his brush. I do not know how many sketches, how many studies, he made of the boar; I do not know how many hours at the close of day when the mountain silence was full of the whisperings of pineneedles he had spent in his cave-studio. One night, the hunters of Hozu village were very much surprised to welcome a strange guest around their evening fire. The strange guest spoke to them of the life of the mountain, of his love for the folks of the woods: he told them how much he had envied their open-air occupation. At last, he took out from the breast folds of his kimono a roll of paper. When he unrolled it, the hunters saw a picture of the wild boar.

" What do you think of it ? Is it the picture of a dead boar ? Do you think it is dead ? " the visitor said.

Without a word, the hunters looked upon it. They seemed a little puzzled at first, and then a bolder one among them gave voice to the common sentiment: " Why, yes, I guess it is dead." And the visitor went away. Almost every day, the hunters saw the same stranger around their evening fire. And every night the pine flames and the eyes of the hunters kindled upon a clever picture of a dead boar. The visitor asked them the same question every time, and the hunters gave him answers that were different neither in words nor intent. And sadly always, the visitor went his lonely way into the shades of night. But one night he came ; brought with him, as usual, the picture of a boar. He asked the same old question of the hunters. But the hunters did not give him the wonted answer.

"Why, no!" they said, "this boar is alive; it's asleep, that is all."

And light came into the eyes of the visitor, and he made his way all through the village of Hozu. In every cottage the answer which was given to him was the same. And in the man who went away from Hozu village, in the fading hours of that night, one could see the very picture of triumph, of an exceeding great joy.

And that is the story they tell. Now Okyo knew very well that those hunters of Hozu village, without the thinnest taint of academic culture or of schooling, could tell at a single glance, and that, too, at the distance of many a yard, whether a boar is dead or alive. And when the consensus of opinion told him that his picture was the picture of a sleeping boar, he was quite sure that he had achieved, for the first time, the feat of painting the fine and very delicate distinction between death and sleeping life.

CHAPTER IV.
THE REALISTIC MOVEMENT
THE UKIO-YE SCHOOL (1700-1867)

TOWARD the middle of the seventeenth century the first faint traces of an influence of Western pictorial art became palpable. The artist Iwasa Matahei was probably one of the first who got interested in occidental laws of composition, his knowledge being gathered largely from stray copper engravings which the Portuguese and Dutch traders had brought with them to Japan. Also Okyo made various attempts in imitating the Dutch; he even copied several engravings for a rich amateur of Nagasaki.

Although these experiments had at the start no decided effect on the Japanese style, they helped to free it more and more from the shackles of Chinese tradition. The artists were initiated into the laws of perspective and foreshortening, first put in practice by Kokan of Nagasaki (1747-1818), and became acquainted with the study from nature and life as practised by Western artists. Shibukohan, Oado, and the lacquerer Kenzan became the most ardent champions of this innovation.

Iwasa Matahei, who became famous about 1640, only changed his range of subjects. He was the first Japanese painter who ever tried to represent subjects which predecessors deemed unworthy of art: the scenes of every-day life. One of the common people, without rank and without pride of blood, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the study of the many entertaining phases of the life of common people. The idyl of a rustic love, the sports of children, the dance, the songs, the festivals of simple village folks, the display of crowded market-places, and also the somewhat shadier sides of life, real and full of soft tints these appealed to him, overwhelmed his enthusiasm, and captured his dreams.

His brush covered large and various fields, and his ink dishes compassed great possibilities of colours. He caught the samurai and the market-men at their merrymaking under the cherry-trees in spring, and it is hard to tell in words how much of grace and unstudied elegance he put into the poses and movements of dancing-girls, and of that entertaining class of women whom we call the geisha to-day. He took rich red, green, yellow, and black, and made them dwell in perfect harmony on his silk, although his colouring is not of the simplest, striving more for richness than the elegance of monochrome.

Toil was the only reward for his work. Without vanity, ever refusing to take himself seriously, like our American painter, Gustav Verbeck, always fond of making fan of any ambitious dreams that might have sprouted in his head, he wished that he, and he alone, might be satisfied. To-day kept on becoming to-morrow, and always he went on without taking thoughts as to his food or raiment. He was always satisfied as long as his stomach did not cry to him too loudly. The reason why it is so very difficult to find a kakemono with his signature upon it, is because he could so rarely persuade himself that it is worth any man's while his least of all to sign his name to the work that came from his brush. This lack of signature has been an eternal regret to the critics of latter days. But this absence of signature has really made his work better recognizable than that of many other artists, and at the same time has told over and over again a very eloquent story of the high ideals held by Matahei, which he had ever striven to attain, which had made him always dissatisfied and unhappy, and which also made him a better artist as the days grew.

Matahei exerted a considerable influence upon succeeding generations, and his principles, carried out by two men of genius, Moronobu (1638-1714) and Hanabusa Itcho, who both became famous by their genre paintings, gave rise to the Ukio-ye or " common " school. This, however, was not fully established until fifty to sixty years later, about 1700, by the contemporaries of Okyo, the great artist who, although not fully in sympathy with the Ukio-ye painters, dealt the death-blow to the Kano school by his innovations.

About 1680, wood-engraving came into vogue. It greatly helped to popularize c.rt. The artists, unable to satisfy the demand for kakemonos, welcomed the process of reproduction with enthusiasm, and many of them turned illustrators. Many phases of life they never had dared to represent on a kakemono could be expressed with impunity in the new medium, as the oribons (i. e. picturebooks) and serial prints only appealed to the middle classes. The nobility had no use for them ; they were " vulgar creations," unfit to be handled by a lady of ]-ank. They never bought them, and even to-day do not rank them highly.

Moronobu, who made a specialty of illustrating the historical events that had happened in different provinces and towns, worked almost exclusively for the engravers. He was the first, also, who represented actors in art. Itcho, on the other hand, had no device to multiply his productions. He was a painter pure and simple. He is remarkable not only for the spirit and gaiety which is characteristic of a great many of his paintings, but also for his method, in which one must admire the expressive use of the brush.

The history of wood-engraving is, to a large extent, the history of the Ukio-ye school itself, and our Western knowledge of Japanese art would be very deficient if we had to depend solely on "wall pictures."

In the beginning only black and white single sheets were produced. Moronobu and Husuyuma Moro were the leading exponents of the Diirer-like woodcuts.

After awhile, they began to colour the prints with reddish orange, and called them the " tan " prints. Torii Kiyonobu (1664-1729) and Kiyamasa made drawings for this kind of prints. A little later they mixed a kind of glue, called nikawa, with the Chinese ink, to give the effect of varnish. They also used gold paint, and called them " lacquer prints." Okumura Massanobu (1690-1768), whose short carves almost possessed the purity of Greek line, Nishimura Shigenaga (16971756), and others, had some of their best efforts reproduced in that way. In the Kyoto school, about 1740, they tried polychrome prints for the first time, and the prints thus reproduced in light green were called " rose prints."

This curious combination of two fragile tints with black outlines was explored to the best advantage by Kiyonobu, Ichigawa Toyonobou (1711-1783), and Torii Koyomitsu (1735-1785). This work belongs to the best Japanese colour-printing has produced.

About 1765, an engraver by the name of Kinroku for the first time produced prints which passed through four or five impressions, and Suzuki Haronobu (17181770) and Buntcho have been interested in this type of prints. Colour has probably never been used in a more refined and more raffine manner than by these artists. The tints they applied were merely hints at colour. They were of a paleness which set one to dreaming without paying attention to what the picture represented. And because these prints were exceedingly fair to the eye, and attractive, the people of the time called them nishikie, which means "brocade pictures." Although at the end of the eighteenth century, Nishikawa, Soukenobu and other artists of Kyoto were trying to cope with the painters of the Yedo brocade pictures, they did not succeed in outshining them, and from that time on, the brocade prints of Yedo became one of the famous products of the city.

The prints of Koriusa, Shighemassa and Shunsho mark a transition period. They strove for more colour, but still hesitated to use it in its full strength. It was left to Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815) to accomplish this. He returned to the ideals of the Tosa school.

The colours he relied upon were the following: Clear yellow, dark chestnut, red-brown, clear orange, mastic white, silver white, vermilion, brilliant violet, black, and brown lacquer. To heighten the brilliancy of their effect, he introduced the device of passing a rice paste upon the wood block each time before spreading the colour.

Other artists besides the painter have contributed to bring about the perfection of these colour prints artists whose names, except in the rarest instances, have perished with them even in Japan. Work equal to theirs is common enough there, but is rare enough here to merit something more than a passing notice.

First, there is the artist engraver. What finished pieces of workmanship are the blocks he cuts! How the lines sweep from his knife with the same unerring grace with which they sprang into life from the brush ! Never a quiver, or shake, or tremble, to rob them of a particle of their dexterous force. Look at the faces of any of the women and see how steady are the lines of the contour, and how wonderfully fine and clear those of the hair as it leaves the forehead.

And then there is the artist printer, who spreads the ink upon the blocks so carefully that every line comes clearly from the hand-pressing, not one of them smudged or blurred. Really, I am not sure whether the place of honour should not be given to the printer. He might have marred the work of the engraver, and spoilt the effect the painter sought for, his methods of printing being the crudest and most unpatentable ; yet, instead of marring, he has added beauties, and left the mark of his own individuality upon the print. His methods were perfect, and perfectly simple. In their chromo-xylographs, the faults of register are very few and far between even the magnifying glass fails to reveal any places where one colour-block has in printing been allowed to envelop another the reason being that this method of printing did not permit any faults of register.

To know whether an old print is authentic or not, one has simply to study the register ; if it deviates only a hairbreadth from the space allotted to it, its authenticity becomes doubtful. I would advise print collectors to purchase only prints with an absolutely perfect register. No price is too high, as such prints will steadily increase in value; while the others are really, artistically as commercially, unprofitable possessions.

In contrast to the Western principle of pressing the block on the paper, and thus obtaining the impression, the Japanese, dispensing with the mechanical means of a press, lays the paper on the block, and pats the paper with simple tampons or " barens." He can regulate and modify the pressure at end where he wishes, and thus obtain the gradated tints and halftones that are so important an element of the charm of Japanese colour prints. When the colour in the picture is shaded, he also shades the tone in the block for every printing, and reproduces it in one pressure. In prints of the highest class two or three colours will often be found shaded in this way. Herein lay the chance for the printer to use his mind as well as his hand, and to prove himself also an artist, and not only a workman.

The value of these colour prints, on which so much art was lavished, was entirely underestimated. They sold so cheaply, that the purchasers handled them rather roughly ; they were absolutely careless about their preservation, to such an extent that prints of masters who flourished from 1720-1750 are now unprocurable, even in a tattered condition. Sometimes the single sheet prints were preserved in books, whence they occasionally emerge with their colours almost in primitive purity. But they were more often posted on screens, especially on small screens which sheltered the hibachi (charcoal stove) from the too frequent drafts of a Japanese house. Rain, wind, dust, smoke of tobacco and of charcoal, each took a share in their destruction. They perished soon, and were soon replaced. The stock was plentiful, was, indeed, being augmented daily, and the price was ridiculously small.

In a land so brimful of art as Japan, it was not surprising, perhaps, that such conceptions did not hold a very high place. But to the rest of the world, which has not, or never had, any popular art to speak of, it is only natural that they quickly appealed to us as not the least among the many art marvels which Japan had in store.

The pages which have been allotted to me are not numerous enough to permit an excursus on all the masters and pupils of the great Ukiyo-ye school. Comparatively few can be mentioned.

The reader may have been astonished at the similarity of names of certain artists. This is, however, easily explained. It is customary for pupils to introduce a character of their master's name into their own. This greatly simplifies the 'study of Japanese painting, as, for instance, all those who were privileged to take into their names the kuni of Toyokuni, the vigorous depicter of stage life, Kunimara, Kunisada, Kunimasa, have mentally as well as technically something in common with Toyokuni, who himself took toyo, like Toyohami, the painter of night festivals, and Toyoshiri, the depicter of animated crowds, from his master, Toyoharu. One is in that way able to trace / relationship between the different artists. The class of artists who have the character Yei Yeishi, Yeiri, Yeizan, and Yeisen was devoted almost exclusively to the charms and graces of Japanese womanhood. The linear beauties of these representations impress one like a nautch, like some languid Oriental dance, in which the bodies undulate with an almost imperceptible vibration. Everything is aerial here ; it is a world of visions, of fragile, fairy creatures, separated from the rest of the world by mysterious garments, which enwrap them and seem to float around them like a dream. Amber faces, very pure outlines, the eyelids and eyelashes singularly long, dark eyes, surcharged with languor and vague passion, and at the same time serious, and with the dignity of well-bred women. They pass their days, idly reclining, wrapped in their silken draperies, in which you can see the pine, the bamboo, the crane, and the turtle worked in gold and silk, amusing themselves with their flowers, their goldfish, and their miniature gardens. Or one of them takes her samisen and fills the empty, screen-encompassed space with some sad and confused melody. We see them arranging their hair intone of the fourteen classic styles known to the Yedo belle, darkening their lips, or arching their eyebrows with tiny sticks of grease paint before curiously shaped mirrors, reflecting the nonchalant expressions of their faces. And their garments, stiff and cumbersome, flash in sun and moon-coloured hues.

The Japanese artists see in woman a glorification of all beautiful things. They even have studied the natural grace of willow, plum, and cherry trees to find the correct expression of her movements and poses.

The Shijo school was strongly in evidence in the latter half of the eighteenth century. There were Yosen (1752-1818), Goshen, the landscapist, and Sosen (17471821). The latter became known for his pictures of monkeys. He devoted his whole life to the study of animals, and his pictures are high priced in England and America. Goshen was one of the great colourists of the new school, and had many pupils, among them Hakkei, the painter of insects and butterflies, Lenzan, the depicter of birds, and Shohizan, whose twigs of cherry blossom were sufficient to make him immortal. Besides these were Seisen, Gakurei, Zaitu and Kaikatei, Kioko, Kuokudo, and Tetsusan.

Perhaps the most talented of Okyo's followers was Nishiyama Hoyen, who died in 1867, at the age of sixty-four. Religious painting, which had ceased to be great since the sixteenth century, received in his grace and tender spirituality its final efflorescence. His painting of the sea-goddess, Kwannon, which all great artists, Chinese and Japanese, have represented, is not as grand and overpowering as Monotobu's. But it is a thoroughly sweet and womanly Kwannon, an expression of the more gentle and feminine moods in Buddhism, corresponding to the worship of the Holy Virgin in Catholic countries. " Clothed in a single robe of spotless white, enveloping her like a thought, dominating her head like a crystal crown, she sits among the jagged rocks of a shore, the great overshadowing spirit of pity, love, and providence." In this work Hoyen has given us no pictorial repetitions. It is a new pictorial creation, built on a new thought.

But Hoyen did not only deal successfully with the human figure and serious religious work, he also realized in his landscapes the highest possibilities of his style. The debasement, the exaggeration, the appeal to vulgar feeling, the domiriance of the comic, which often deface the accomplishments of modern Oriental art, are in Hoyen utterly lacking. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he kept his eyes fixed on the spiritual heights of the Tosa and Kano masters, while preserving perfect originality.

The painters of the Ukio-ye school had rather a hard time in the meanwhile. They were dependent on publishers and print-sellers, and many of them led a rather precarious existence. They accepted whatever commission fell into their hands now drawing for the engravers sketches that appeared in albums, now decorating the panels of a temple or mansion, now dashing off a rough colour sketch at the rate of a few cents a sheet, now wandering off into the country with some congenial spirit to enjoy life entirely after their own fashion, and to take what chance might throw in their way.

The reformatory work that had been begun by Moronobu and Itcho was continued by Miyagawa Chosun. He did not restrict himself to the narrow limits of the later Kano pigments, reds, yellows, blues, and greens, but enriched them all with a new scale of strange browns, clives, purples, and grays. He drew his figures very much like Moronobu, only less harsh in outline, while his backgrounds were treated in the dashy style of Sesshin. The eighteenth century was an age of splendid patterns in garments, large sweeping areas of patterns, as distinguished from the finely diapered garments of the Genroku period, and Chosun was very fond of drawing them, as they lend themselves so easily to colour schemes. He put in a dash of colour here and there where one least expected it, a trick he had learned of Korin and Kenzan. His favourite subjects were street scenes of Yedo. His best known works are " Hundred Poets," "Fans," and "Mirror of Beauty," perhaps the most beautiful picture-books ever produced. Other painters who greatly helped the popular movement were Teisan, the two brothers, Torii Kiyonobu and Torii Kiyomitsu, Buntcho, Toyokusi, Haronobu, and Soukenobu.

Kiyonobu (1664-1729) became famous for his arrangement in rose and green. He exhausted these two colours completely. No European artist to my knowledge has ever balanced these two colours so perfectly. Buntcho (1765-1801), retained all his life by a prince, indulged in historical researches, and the depiction of actors, very original both in design and colour feeling. Ever since Chikamitsu's dramas had become popular, there had been a rage for actor prints. Nearly all artists devoted some sheets to this hitherto so degraded profession. Toyokuni, and later Kuniyoshy ( 1796-1 86 i),~seemed particularly adapted to this work. The violence of dramatic gesture, although exaggerated almost to the verge of the ridiculous, are masterly rendered by them.

Kuniyoshy, in particular, was a wild, unrestrained talent, with an imagination that was neither to bend nor to break. His fantastic landscapes were a positive rejection of all the theories and established rules of aestheticism. His illustrations of the " Forty-seven Ronins," the national drama of loyalty and revenge, made him popular all over the islands. Two pupils of Buntcho, Totsugen and Bumpo, became very popular through their numerous albums of caricatures.

Soukenobu created a peculiar type of woman, plump young girls with round and laughing faces. They were unlike those of any other Japanese artist. Seated or standing under flower branches, at the bases of graceful trees, walking in the fields or flowery garden bowers, they always have a grace of their own. He is the poet of the Japanese young girl, decorated with fans, in a long robe which winds from her feet in undulating folds, in the landscape of a dream, peopled with fairy birds caroling to the gods.

Suzuki Haronobu (1765) was more of a revolutionary spirit. He endeavoured to remove the stigma of vulgarity which still clung to his school. " Though I work in prints," he proudly exclaimed, " I shall style myself hereafter 'master painter of the national school of Japan.' "

He possessed a governing spirit, ideas of his own, and irreverence for the conventions, thanks to which he was destined to become the admirable painter he was. He was the loving delineator of the domestic life of the middle classes. He had very curious ideas of form, but his line had a beautiful flow and swing to it. He saw everything in colour, and was able to invest a morsel of nature with its natural harmony of light. It was really he who introduced atmosphere into Japanese painting. By the power of mental isolation, of concentration in himself, of absorption of his faculties in nature only, and by the positive rejection of all theories and established rules of aestheticism, of all that had not for its motive the living present, his eye refined itself to all the swift reflections, the subtle quiverings, the fleeting effects of light in nature. His hand grew, at the same time, more supple and strong in its grasp of the unforeseen and unexpected aerial effects which revealed themselves to him ; while his palette became clear, joyous, luminous, fluent with sunlight and permeated by the brightness of the sky. His favourite colours were green, purple, and low-toned oranges.

Independent of the realistic movement worked Tchikuden and Hoitsu. Tchikuden became known in Europe by a masterpiece of natural simplicity, an eagle perched on a rock, overlooking the sea. Although replete with personal qualities, one can trace in him the influence of the Kano school.

Hoitsu (1716-1828) a daimyo by birth, painted for pleasure. He studied in many studios, but found that the ideals of the Tosa school, with a few modifications, were best suited to flower painting, which was his specialty. He had a very talented pupil in Kiitsou. The morningglories, full of dew, with a suggestion of the waning moon behind, are deliciously rendered.

In their delineations of flowers, these two painters succeeded in reviving all the graces of their delicate organism, the almost inexpressible tenderness of their fleeting forms, the living brightness and glory of their colours, and even the unsubstantial exhalations of their perfumes.

Toward 1795, when Kiyonaga, the son of Kiyomitsou sprang into sudden fame, the Ukio-ye school had become a school of national importance. It had proven its worth, and prejudice concerning it had grown less strong.

They had gone forth into the streets of Yedo, elated with love for their native city, and quivering with inspiration. They were fascinated by the inexhaustible variety of her sights and scenes, and they had allowed their vagabond fancy to absorb the splendour of light and colour which pervaded all these scenes of popular life. They had learned to look at objects in a more rational way ; their knowledge of form had marvellously improved; they did not longer disregard shadows entirely, and, if their perspective is incorrect from our point of view, it is wilfully so, for the landscapes on some of their lacquer trays of that period show that even inferior artists had mastered it.

Kiyonaga (1752-1818) led the Ukio-ye to greater height of technical perfection than it had ever reached before. He was a direct forerunner of Hokusai, one of the greatest draughtsmen in a time when good draughtsmen were the rule. His brushstroke has a tremendous vigour, as shown in his paintings. He revelled in air and action. Picnic parties, groups at the temples, dances, crowds on holidays were his special forte. Human forms leaped as if alive from his restless brush. He left behind him a remarkable series of works.

One volume is devoted to landscape, another to flowers, a third to fishes, and several others contain, in very animated outlines, sketches of ordinary life. He was very careless in detail; his ink simply rained down on the paper, and gained outlines and accents entirely by the certainty of his hand and eye. He cared only for the general appearance of objects, treating everything in silhouette, and with sketchy modelling.

Many other artists could be mentioned as Kunisada, Nagahura, the embodiment of elegance, Ganka, Shigenaga, Shosizan, Torei, Morofusa, Morinaga, Motonaga, Tsunenobu, the painter of peacocks and giant chrysanthemums, and his pupils Tchikonobu and Minenubo, Taigado and Bunlei, two belated Kano painters, and many others.

But one must refrain. As said before, it is impossible to mention them all. Each one had some distinguishing trait. Their works, painted or engraved, charm at first sight by the variety of subjects and attitudes which can be found in the reproductions of no other period.

The greatest merit of the Ukio-ye school, however, is that it has given us three great artists, in which almost the whole of Japanese pictorial art seems to be summed up for the Western world, Outomaro Kitagawa (17531805), Hiroshige (1797-1868), and Hokusai ( 1 760-1 849).

Outomaro is known as the greatest painter of Japanese women. He cared less for severity and purity of expression than his predecessors. He disdained the round and stumpy figures of Chinese origin by Soukenobu, and the robust and sculpturesque women of Kiyonaga; he sacrificed everything to delicacy of treatment. The shades of expression in his women are so delicate and transient, the impression of their charm so fleeting, their features and their type so hovering between prettiness and ugliness, that even his crones seemed as if they might once have been pretty as the prettiest maidens, whose grace the slightest touch of change would mar.

He also had a larger conception of his subject. He did not merely strive for external beauty. He represented the Japanese woman in all the various phases of her domestic life, and with a keenness of observation which almost borders on psychological insight. He represented her in her babyhood, carried on the back of her mother, as child, as young girl, playing the samisen, or studying the "Collection of One Thousand Leaves," as sweetheart under the plum-tree, as young wife going through the tea ceremony, as mother, as adultress or adventuress, and finally in her old age. He penetrated as far as it is possible to go into the feminine mode of life.

He was also very fond of depicting the life of actresses, of geishas, and the inmates of the green houses of the Yoshiwara. This is probably the reason why so many critics have called him a sensualist. To me he is the most ethereal of painters. True enough, he was a man of easy morals, and greatly addicted to pleasure, who spent the largest part of life in the Yoshiwara, and finally died of constitutional exhaustion at the age of fifty. But his art he took seriously. He eliminated everything that might have appeared fleshly or physical. He used geishas and courtesans as models because they seemed more graceful to him, and because he could study them at leisure. In his pictures women, even if they represent courtesans, look invariably like princesses. ^Esthetically dissatisfied with the small size of his countrywomen, he drew them taller and slenderer, and imbued their elongated shapes with infinite tenderness and grace. His serial " Silk-worms," in which he depicted the " Forty -seven Ronins," as represented by the most beautiful women, is the masterpiece of his career The workmanship of these pages is exquisite, and the beauty and delicacy of forms and flowing lines has never been excelled.

Not content with the representation of figures and scenes in single engravings, the artists of this time produced compositions spreading over several leaves. Outomaro was particularly fond of triptychs. As a colourist, he ranks with the best of the Ukio-ye school. His colour vschemes were mostly conceived in four tints, a deep black, a tender white, a pink of the colour of rose-leaves, and a sombre, melancholy violet.

Outomaros are oftener offered for sale than any other colour prints, but comparatively few are authentic. He was a very prolific artist, but, as he enjoyed a great reputation in his own lifetime, he became somewhat unscrupulous. In order to increase his production he employed a certain number of pupils to work with him, whose works were signed with his name. Moreover, after his death his widow married one of his pupils, who signed the name of the dead man to his own work, and, in addition, the publishers themselves appear to have long continued to employ others of his pupils who always made use of his name. The number of prints signed with the name Outomaro is enormous. But all of these are very far from possessing the charm, the elegance, and the high qualities of those which are really due to the master.

Hiroshige, generally regarded as the foremost landscape painter of Japan, was born at Yedo and was a pupil of Toyohiro. His earliest work was a series of views of Mount Fusiyama, dated 1820. His masterpieces, however, including the "Go-jiu-sen Eki Tokaido" ("Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido "), were published after 1845, in the decline of his life. He died of cholera during the great epidemic of 1858.

Hiroshige's favourite subjects were the scenes of every day in and around Yedo, and along the picturesque highway connecting Yedo with Kyoto. He had settled down with the determination to conquer the beauties of nature within the vicinity of his native town. These he knew from childhood, and they appealed to him most strongly. Nearly every artist had already painted the Tokaido, but Hiroshige tackled it in an entirely novel manner. Like Monet he was satisfied with one subject, but represented it in all hours of the day, in all seasons of the year, and in all conditions of the atmosphere. He completely exhausted the subject. Two artists of considerable talent, Shunchosai and Settan, who, some years later, treated the same subject in a similar manner, had nothing new to add. Their works resemble topographical handbooks; they lack Hiroshige's power of invention, his keen observation of traffic and animated crowds, his firm pencil and instinct for colour. He was the first landscape painter who gave to his foreground figures almost as conspicuous a part as the landscape itself.

He was an innovator in many respects. He had picked up a few ideas upon the European theories of perspective, and constantly made use of them. His vanishing-points were not always in the right place, but on the whole his compositions greatly gained in reality by these experiments. He also recognized the existence of projecting shadows, and introduced faithful reflections of the moon and lanterns into his pictures, an accomplishment which was sternly tabooed by the older artists.

He also drew birds, flowers, and caricatures, but they are mediocre productions. His originality only revealed itself in his landscape works. His " Fifty- three Stations of the Tokaido," printed in colours, and his " Pictorial Description of Yedo," In twelve volumes, and " Views of the Tokaido," both printed in black and pale blue, are of permanent value. The appearances of rain, mist, and wind, the frigidity of the snow-laden streets and fields, the vague colours of night, have rarely been more faithfully represented.

It is life, in fact, which fills his picture with virile spirit, and breathes into them a new and astonishing vitality. It is the life of the air, of the water, of odours, and of lights; the ungraspable and invisible life of the spheres, synthesized with an admirable boldness and an eloquent audacity, which are the product of delicacy of perception, and the indication of a superior comprehension of the great harmonies of nature. The nuptial gaieties of the spring, the burning drowsiness of summer, the anguishes of the autumn on its bed of purple, under its canopies of gold; the splendid and cold bridal vestments of the winter in all of them life is resuscitated and triumphant. And in all this resplendency of nature, nothing is left to the chance of inspiration, however happy, nor to the hazard of an accidental brush-stroke, however facile and spirited.

His colouring was as simple as it was superb. A sea painted apparently with one sweep of indigo, lined with mountains expressed in a few daubs of violet, and some calligraphic flourishes in red and green, representing a bridge and trees, were sufficient to produce an exquisite colour harmony. Two charming colours which are very noticeable in his landscapes are the green of oxidized metal, as seen at old weather-beaten temple gates, and the deep crimson of lacquer. They are a little difficult to reproduce with our Western colours, but I am informed that cobalt green renders the former, and Rubens madder, with dragon's blood for the shadow, the tone of the lacquer almost exactly.

The greatest exponent of the realistic school is Hokusai, a pupil of Shunsho, who, dying at the age of eighty-nine, left behind hundreds of kakemonos, and eighty serial works in over five hundred volumes.

All the sterling qualities of his predecessors seem to have concentrated in this fertile genius. The " Mangwa," a collection of sketches in fourteen volumes, and the "One Hundred Views of Fusiyama," which have made his name familiar to the Western world, fail to give a complete idea of his genius. They bear witness to his marvellous versatility, to the virility of his line-work, and to the harmony of his colours, but they do not compare with his paintings, especially those which represent the human form and the tranquil scenes of popular life.

The visitor to Japan encounters Hokusai's types at every step. He has immortalized his countrymen, walking about in straw rain-coats and immense mushroom-shaped hats, and straw sandals: bareheaded peasants, deeply burned by wind and sun ; patient mothers with smiling bald babies upon their backs, toddling by upon their high wooden clogs; and robed merchants squatting and smoking their little brass pipes among the countless riddles of their shops.

The " Mangwa " is a universal kaleidoscope, where everything and every type of being jostle each other in a picturesque confusion, an endless panorama in which nothing escapes the keen analysis of the artist and observer. There are a set of fat people, and a set of lean people, a procession of drunkards, beggars, and studies of old men and women, national heroes, fabulous animals, demons and apparitions. He has sketched all the curious antics of which gymnasts and acrobats are capable. He has reproduced the masks of the ancient religious, the No dances, masks with exaggerated expressions, masks of demons, or animals and grotesque personages. We see country folks at their daily avocations. He introduced us into the workshops of artisans wood - carvers, smiths, metal workers, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers pass review. He only held aloof from the theatre and the Yoshiwara.

Notwithstanding the directness, sometimes a little rude, of his method, no one has analyzed nature, the character and details of things, and the living appearance of figures, with more ease, intelligence, and penetration.

Like all great artists, he was never satisfied with his work. He wrote at the age of seventy-five these humourous and heartfelt words : " From my sixth year on a peculiar mania of drawing all sorts of things took possession of me. At my fiftieth year I had published quite a number of works of every possible description, but none were to my satisfaction. Real work began with me only in my seventieth year. Now at seventyfive the real appreciation of nature wakens within me. I therefore hope that at eighty I may have arrived at a certain power of intuition, which will develop further until my ninetieth year, so that at the age of one hundred I can proudly assert that my intuition is thoroughly artistic. And, should it be granted to me to live one hundred and ten years, I hope that a vital and true comprehension of nature may radiate from every one of my lines and dots."

(You see, Hokusai is more modest than some of our Western artists !)

Hokusai was as proficient in landscapes as in figures. His serial of Eleven Waterfalls shows his fidelity to and respect for nature. The movement of the water, the outline of the rocks ; the local colour and particular details of each scene, are marvellously rendered.

Study, it matters not what picture ofC Hokusai's and you will see that even the smallest details of which they are composed are logically in sympathy with one another, that even the smallest blade of grass and slenderest branch are dependent on the width and length of the Composition. The exquisite grace by which we are charmed, the force we feel, the strength of construction which they bring before us, the splendid poetry which stirs our souls with admiration, proceed from this exactitude. We truly seem, in the contemplation of these pictures, to scent the odour of the earth, and to feel the lightest breath from heaven. The breeze from the sea brings to one's ears the sonority of the wide waves, or the softly murmured sound of ripples on the beaches of creeks and gulfs of silver and blue. We see appear successively the banks of the bay of Tokyo at all seasons and all hours: her fields joyous with the gaiety of the harvest; the same fields, sad and desolate, with naked trees under the cold gray sky of winter ; on frosty days irradiated by the sun into the shimmering splendour of a dust of diamonds; in fogs, thick and . heavy, where the vapour expands in waves which are visible and veritably moving.^ In the blossoming trees upon the banks of the stream one finds a beauty truly Japanesque. His breaking up of the ice in the stream, where, driven by the current, it is piled up against its banks in quaint and dismal forms, is at once tender and tragic.

But, above all else, he was the painter of the Fusiyama, the sacred mountain "of which all poets and women of the island dream." It appears in nine out of ten of all his landscape compositions. No matter what his theme, the snow-covered summit of Fuji appears somewhere in the distance. He has shown it to us at all the different hours of the day, through the seasons and the ever-changing phenomena of light. We see it reveal its rough outlines in a cloudless sky, through the meshes of a netted sail, in the rays of the setting sun, in rain and snow storms, through reedy shores where the wild geese cackle, and as a ghostly silhouette against the nocturnal sky. Monet's " Rouen cathedrals " and " Haystacks " are merely child's play in comparison to these profound studies.

A Japanese writer has described his versatility in the following charming manner :

" I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long softly, softly. Then I was up and away. I saw the countless green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees ; I watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into shapes torn and multiform. I sauntered here and there, carelessly, without aim or volition. Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and loitered as the echo repeated the cry of wild cranes. Now I was in the cherry grove of Owari. Through the mists, shifting across the coast of Miho, I descried the famous ponies of Suminoye. Now I stood trembling upon the bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at the gigantic Fuki plants. The roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me. It was only a dream which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window, with this book of pictures by the master as a cushion beneath my head."

It is always the same thought that guides Hokusai through these multiplied aspects of nature. He seizes upon the characteristics of a field, of a bit of the ocean, of a rock, a tree, a flower or figure, in its most individual expression, in its passing charm of motion and harmony of colour. Study these kakemonos, colour prints, and sketch-books, in the order of their dates, and you will each time see that the painter's methods improve, that his sensibility to the mysteries of nature becomes more developed, that his eye discovers new and unknown forms and effects ; but you do not feel from his work any hesitation in his art, any uncertainty of a mind seduced yesterday by one ideal, and to-day troubled by another. His step is always in advance, in the same direction, firm, resolute, and unwavering ; o