Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/62

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scenery, and without having beheld any of the spots depicted by the old landscape-masters of China, squandered an infinity of talent and ingenuity in building up new creations of their own with the material borrowed at second hand from their neighbours.

Connoisseurs are wont to divide into three great streams the flood of Chinese renaissance that invaded Japan in the fifteenth century; the purely Chinese stream, just spoken of as springing from Josetsu and Shiubun; the Sesshiu stream, springing from Sesshiu, whom many count the most colossal figure in Japanese art; and the Kano stream, springing from Masanobu and Motonobu, who, whether they rank above or below Sesshiu, certainly founded the chief academy of Japanese painters. The reader will at once seek some explanation of the reasons underlying this division. It is difficult to give any that can be called satisfactory. As to Sesshiu, some Japanese connoisseurs claim that he developed a peculiar style of his own, untrammelled by classical conditions. To Occidental eyes, however, this independence is not easily apparent. He adhered to Chinese motives and Chinese methods as faithfully as did Shiubun and his disciples, and no dictum appears truer than that Sesshiu was "the open door through which all contemporary and subsequent artists looked into the seventh heaven of Chinese genius." Masanobu and Motonobu, the founders of the Kano school, were not less "classic" than Sesshiu. In the works of all three masters, though in varying degree, there are found the noble breadth of design, the subtle relationship of tones, the splendid calligraphic force and the "all-pervading sense of poetry" that constituted the highest features of Chinese pictorial art in the Tang, Sung, and Yuan