Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/81

RV 59 school understood linear perspective sufficiently not to offend by obvious disregard of its rules, but they neglected chiaroscuro, and that defect disqualified their composition to be called a faultless achievement, which epithet would otherwise be often applicable to their admirable grouping of pictorial elements.

This brief analysis may be closed by referring to one fault conspicuous in all these artists' work: they did not understand the light-suggestions without which textures and surfaces cannot be rendered. They relied upon line and colour to produce effects which are due in nature to the uneven distribution, absorption, or reflection of light. Hence, while they show with admirable accuracy the folds of drapery and the patterns winding and flowing through all its plies, they fail to tell whether the surface represented is that of velvet or of silk or of cotton. It has been well said that in judging pictures one must consider what the painter succeeds in doing, and not be forever critical about what he fails to do. The ukiyo-ye artists achieved so much that much may be forgiven to them, but since genre pictures are certainly the proper field for the display of texture painting, the absence of this quality in the ukiyo-ye work cannot be left unnoticed.

The naturalistic tendency of which the pictures of the Popular school are the most characteristic outcome, found very refined and beautiful expression in the works of Maruyama Okio (born 1733, died 1795), a Kyōtō artist, who must be regarded as one of the greatest painters Japan ever produced. Okio is generally spoken of as the founder of the Shi-jo school (Shi-jo is the name of a part of Kyōtō), and his contemporary Kishi Doshi (known artistically as