Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/44

RV 24 boughs waving on the paper; the vivid, crisp figure-subjects and the exquisitely delicate suggestions of still life and landscape by Li Lung-yen; the bamboos of Yuh Kien, every leaf drinking the sunny air and every spray instinct with lustiness; the eager, timid wild-fowl and wood-birds of Wan Chin and Wang Lieh-pan; the tender glimpses of scenic gems by Liu Liang and Lu Ki, like choice stanzas from a great poem—these and many another graceful conception, delineated with such fidelity to the first canon of art that a maximum of effect is produced with a minimum of visible effort, reveal the gallery where Japanese painters found their inspiration from century to century. Nothing has ever been written that sums up more happily and justly the facts now under discussion than the following extract from the work of that most accurate and discriminating student of Far-Eastern pictorial art, the late Dr. William Anderson:—

There is, perhaps, no section of art that has been so completely misapprehended in Europe as the pictorial art of China. For us the Chinese painter, past or present, is but a copyist who imitates with laborious and undiscriminating exactness whatever is laid before him, rejoices in the display of as many and as brilliant colours as his subject and remuneration will permit, and is original only in the creation of monstrosities. Nothing could be more contrary to the fact than this impression, if we omit from consideration the work executed for the foreign market,—work which every educated Chinese would disown. The old masters of the Middle Kingdom, who, as a body, united grandeur of conception with immense power of execution, cared little for elaboration of detail, and, except in Buddhist pictures, sought their best efforts in the simplicity of black and white, or in the most subdued of chromatic harmonies. Their art was