Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/51

RV 31 several names—above all, those of Hirotaka and Meichō (commonly called Chō Dense)—are specially celebrated for paintings of this class, but the student will find that Japan's best artists in all ages contributed their quota to the pictorial treasures of the temples, and that not until after the twelfth century did the secular picture rise to a place of fully equal importance with the sacred.

Considering what a small number of authenticated pictures offer themselves for examination, an attempt to distinguish between the technical characteristics of the religious, or Chinese, and the secular, or Japanese, schools at this early stage may seem unwarranted. The distinction is made, however, by Japanese connoisseurs, and finds confirmation in later evidence. The secular artist, they say, held his brush oblique, and aimed at a light and fine style of delineation, choosing simple and tender colours. The religious artist held his brush perpendicular; sought accuracy before everything; did not attempt to vary the thickness of his strokes, and used stronger colours than his secular confrere. Such a verdict, it may be remarked, harmonises exactly with the indications furnished by the calligraphical styles of the Chinese and the Japanese. Both starting from the same point, one nation preserved the square, formal, and mathematically exact type of ideograph, whereas the other developed a cursive, graceful, and unconventional script.

The divergence of the Japanese secular artist's brush from strictly Chinese lines gradually became so marked that, in about a hundred years from the time of Kanaoka,—that is to say, in the middle of the tenth century,—the public clearly recognised the