Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/82

RV 60 "Ganku") is placed at the head of a separate school, the Ganku Riu. But though the individuality of each master impressed itself on his style sufficiently, perhaps, to justify this independent classification, both are nothing more than great representatives of the naturalistic sentiment of the era, and both are differentiated from their Ukiyo-ye contemporaries chiefly by the fact that they never devoted their talents to the purposes of the woodcut or the chromo-xylograph. In force, grace, tenderness, and accuracy of line Okio has no superior among Japanese artists. He went direct to nature for instruction, but into all his exquisite pictures of birds, flowers, grasses, fish, insects, quadrupeds, and figures, he introduced a subjective element as eloquent as it is indescribable. It has been said that his drawing of the human figure showed all the anatomical errors of his predecessors, but it must also be said that the question of anatomy never presents itself for a moment in connection with his pictures, and that one has no more inclination to criticise his manner of articulating bones and moulding muscles than one has to remember the surgical solecisms of Michael Angelo or Delacroix. With the exceptions of Mori Sosen and Kano Tanyu, no artist has ever been so assiduously copied in Japan as Okio. Forgeries of his works exist in hundreds, but the originals remain always unapproachable.

An eminent critic calls Ganku "stupendous," and describes him as "the only artist of recent times worthy to be ranked on a level with the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." Probably not many will be found to confirm that verdict from their own observation. Ganku died just sixty-three years ago (1838). Numbers of his works remain. The