Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/89

RV 67 parents and ought to have preserved for their sakes. A strangely sounding voice from the past must this have seemed to many of those who had come to burn incense at the painter's tomb,—men in whose memory the events of his last days were still fresh, though the epoch itself might have been centuries removed, so great a change had come over the political complexion of the times. The collection of Watanabe's works comprised many hundred pictures and studies. Of some it would be difficult to speak too highly. The combined vigour and delicacy of their execution, the excellence of their composition, and the life breathing from their lines showed that the anti-foreign prejudices of his era inflicted few heavier losses on the country than the untimely death of such a master. It is not of the purely Japanese pictures, however, that special mention should be made in this context, but rather those showing traces of Western influence. There are many such. The subjects were not distinctly foreign, if some studies of animal life be excepted; but evidences that the artist had imbibed the spirit of Occidental linear perspective and chiaroscuro were apparent in several pictures, otherwise purely Japanese. This was notably true of a portrait, half-life size, of a well-known Buddhist priest. It might have been painted by a Western artist, and would have done credit to any European brush of Watanabe's era. Is it not easy to understand the reason of the "want of receptivity" to which Dr. Anderson alludes? The penalty of being receptive was out of proportion to the apparent reward. Undoubtedly Hokusai felt the influence obeyed by Kwazan with such fateful results. Many of the works of the great ukiyo-ye master bear traces of