Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/87

RV 65 ultimate success, mediocre as have been the results hitherto obtained.

The modern hybrid school has been spoken of above as a revival rather than a new creation. Such a form of speech will perhaps be challenged, for more than one writer of high authority has denied that any marked traces of Western art are visible in Japanese pictures painted before the opening of the country forty years ago. It is admitted that in the field of copperplate engraving some aid was received from the Dutch at the close of the eighteenth century, and that a few of the later artists of the Popular school obeyed the laws of linear perspective; but even such an astute critic and accurate historian as the late Dr. Anderson speaks with surprise of the "want of receptiveness" of Japanese artists, and surmises that it was chiefly due to the low grade of the European pictorial works coming under their observation during the era of restricted foreign intercourse. There is another explanation,—an explanation vividly illustrated in the story of an artist who had hitherto received singularly inadequate notice from foreign essayists. On the 23rd of November in the year 1840 died by his own hand, in Yedo, Watanabe Kwazan. He was a member of the patrician (shizoku) order. During the last two decades of his life Japan had begun to turn slowly but surely towards Occidental civilisation. It is customary to speak of the restoration in 1867 as the period when this change of sentiment first made itself distinctly manifest. But the calculation is nearly a century late. Officialdom, indeed, still adhered firmly to the traditional policy of seclusion handed down from the days when the intemperance of Christian propagandists and the jealousies of