Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/27

RV 7 tional in his eyes to take a drawing of a danseuse from a posed girl, or to gather the idea of a bird in flight from a stuffed specimen with extended wings. "Objects at rest can never seem to be in motion," would have been his thought, "however their limbs be disposed or their muscles stretched." Therefore he painted moving objects according to his impression of the appearance they presented when in motion, and it was such a correct impression that his birds seemed to be flying out of the canvas, his dancers moving across the field of vision. In that feature of his art he found few equals and no superiors. The nude had no place in his repertoire of subjects. To hang a drawing of an undraped female in an alcove would have been judged as intolerable a violation of propriety as though a host should discard his clothes to receive a visitor. How much the Japanese lost, how much they gained, by excluding such subjects from their pictorial art, need not be discussed here. But reference may be made to the fact that the question is now actively agitating public opinion. Two or three painters, disciples of the Occidental School, have invited a conclusive decision by exhibiting pictures of the nude, and the nation hesitates whether to welcome or to taboo the innovation. It must be confessed that the challenge has been very rudely issued. The paintings upon which judgment is to be based have hitherto been entirely without the atmosphere of refinement and idealism which alone can veil the gross features of such representations. Were the circumstances ever so favourable, however, it is probable that more than one generation must come and go before Japanese taste can be even partially reconciled to pictures of the nude. At all events, there has