Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/206

 terise the Japanese. The Chinese sculptor is not without humour, but his fancy seems to be always trammelled by grim practicality and narrow conventionalism. His influence upon Japanese sculptors was not wholesome, and they soon rebelled against it. Here, however, there is one point that attracts attention. The Chinese had a certain appreciation of the nude in sculpture. Among these seal-handle carvings—which, it must be remembered, were considered worthy of the finest workmanship that could be bestowed on them and of the costliest material available—nude female figures occur not infrequently. But it would be very difficult to determine whether grace of form or sensuous suggestion was the sculptor's objective in choosing such motives. His manner of treatment leaves the question exceedingly doubtful. At all events, he found no imitators in Japan. The nude never appealed to the Japanese sculptor. His realistic creed often appears in his manner of disposing the drapery of a peasant mother's dress or the skirts of a lady caught in a gust of wind and rain, but it is evident either that he failed to appreciate the exquisite curves of the female form, though in all other directions beauty and force of line constitute his special excellence, or that he associated the nude with the erotic. There is a pornographic side to his work, but it is of the most unequivocal character. He never stood upon that hazy border line of stheticism and voluptuousness that runs through the whole of Occidental art from the times of Tanagra to the days of Giacometti and Hermann François.

By the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the range of the netsuke-