Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/65

RV 43 and both are to be traced to the political and economic conditions of the time rather than to any independent art impulse. The whole period of the Tokugawa Regency's sway—that is to say, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first half of the nineteenth—was marked by profound peace and by the spread of luxurious habits hitherto confined to the great administrative families in the Imperial capital. The applied arts certainly attained their highest development during those centuries, and it is probably safe to say that in no other country nor at any other epoch, ancient or modern, were the services of pictorial art so widely and so successfully employed for decorative purposes. Further, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, a patriotic reaction can be traced against the slavish adherence of the classical schools to Chinese motives and methods, and a growing impulse to favour the work of the Kano and Tosa masters, who chose Japanese subjects and attached to the decorative quality in their pictures importance which brought them into close touch with the architectural developments of the time. Doubtless this taste for exquisite harmonies of colour and glowing yet tender tints, grand illustrations of which may be seen in the interior decoration of temples, palaces, and mansions, owed something to a contemporaneous change in Chinese pictorial methods,—a change from the noble simplicity and force of the Tang, Sung, and Yuan monochromes to the strong, full-bodied colours and microscopically elaborate style of the later Ming pictures. But the influence of Chinese artists was not a prime factor in the movement: it must be regarded rather as a reflection of the development of Japanese civilisation under the Tokugawa Regents, the ten-