Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/18

6 of his art he found few equals and no superiors. The nude had no place in his répertoire of subjects. To persons that have seen men and women bathing together at thermal springs in Japan, or the wives and daughters of a rustic hamlet taking an al-fresco tub, or almost naked coolies toiling between the shafts of a jinrikisha, it may seem scarcely credible that exposure of any part of the person was always considered a gross solecism by refined Japanese. Such is the fact, however. What the labourer did because of his labour, the plebeian woman because of her vulgarity, the lady on account of her health, were acts, tolerated, not approved. The nude was seen, but never looked at. To hang a drawing of an undraped female in an alcove would have been judged as intolerable a violation of propriety as though a host should discard his clothes to receive a visitor. How much the Japanese lost, how much they gained, by excluding such subjects from their pictorial art, need not be discussed here. But reference may be made to the fact that the question is now actively agitating public opinion. Two or three painters, disciples of the Occidental School, have invited a conclusive decision by exhibiting pictures of the nude, and the nation hesitates whether to welcome or to taboo the innovation. It must be confessed that the challenge has been very rudely issued. The paintings upon which judgment is to be based have hitherto been entirely without the atmosphere of refinement and idealism which alone can veil the gross features of such representations. Were the circumstances ever so favourable, however, the writer of these notes believes that more than one generation must come and go before Japanese taste can be even partially reconciled to pictures of the nude. At all events there has been nothing of the kind as yet in the country’s art. It is an easily understood corollary that anatomical studies never occupied the artist’s attention. That defect in his education often forces itself painfully upon observation, especially in his delineation of hands and feet. Perhaps for the same reason he fails signally in his attempt to draw animals—horses, oxen, foxes, tigers, elephants, wolves, dogs, and so forth. Strange that the accuracy of his observation, conspicuous in other things, should be so markedly defective in this field. He can limn a fish, a bird, an insect, or even a fluffy little puppy-dog to perfection, but when he has to trace outlines that depend for their correctness on knowledge of the bony and muscular structures beneath, he errs perpetually. Directness of method and power of line are among his chief merits. As to the latter quality, its genesis may be attributed to the use of ideographic script. The training that every Japanese child receives from a tender age in tracing ideographs, educates a brush-using facility which has become in some degree hereditary. It may be laid down as axiomatic that an intimate relationship exists between Japanese caligraphy and Japanese painting, and that the Japanese eye detects in brush strokes an æsthetic beauty too subtle to appeal to men living outside the ideographic pale. Touch, as has been well said by a great connoisseur of Japanese pictorial art, is not by any means the most important quality in a picture, but it nevertheless contributes largely to the flavour and vitality of an