Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/48

RV 28 proportions by legends which show incidentally that he painted landscapes, portraits, and other natural subjects, but the sole and somewhat doubtful outcome of his brush that survives is a set of insignificant religious sketches. Nevertheless his countrymen insist that to him and his immediate successor, Kose no Kanaoka, the merit of founding a native school must be assigned. Kanaoka has been placed by many historians at the beginning of Japanese pictorial art, but the logic of evolution is better consulted by putting him near the climax of an epoch, for talent such as he seems to have possessed cannot reasonably be associated with any initiatory stage of art development. Unhappily he too is known to posterity by reputation only. Several pictures are indeed ascribed to him, and, from the evidence they furnish, two descriptions of his style have been confidently adduced: the first declaring that delicacy and minuteness were his characteristics, and that he aimed at decorative effect rather than at boldness or vigour; the second affirming that, like the great Chinese artist Wu-Tao-tsz, upon whom he modelled himself, his conceptions were as broad and lofty as his style was masculine and direct. Either or both analyses may be correct, for the truth is that none of the pictures attributed to Kanaoka can be viewed without great distrust. The ablest judges agree that all must be set aside as apocryphal, and that no materials exist for an estimate except annals which speak with profound enthusiasm of the portraits, landscapes, and representations of animals painted by him. It will be perceived, too, that there is nothing in all this to indicate a departure from Chinese models. The Tang masters also painted landscapes, portraits, and animals, and painted them in