Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/49

Rh drawing inspiration direct from the exquisite scenery of their own country and the noble acts of their own countrymen and countrywomen, were content to copy Chinese ideals of landscape, and to devote themselves to illustrating Chinese traditions. It is easy to conceive what a despotism of methods, of mannerisms, and of conventionalities would reign in such a school. Just as West’s great picture of Wolfe’s death was supposed to violate all the proprieties of art because the figures were depicted in eighteenth-century coats and hats instead of Grecian “drapery” or Roman togas, so the Japanese disciple of the Chinese School had to obey canons which cramped his originality and were only saved from becoming anachronistic by the immemorial conservatism of the Chinese nation. Concerning the excellences of this School, we may say that, apart from force, directness, and delicacy of line, which are common to all Japanese masters, there is a really remarkable sense of “values;” a subtle attention to colour gradations and atmospheric conditions which would have given almost perfect results had the principle been recognised that nature does not show accented outlines; that edges are never the deepest notes of colour in her landscapes and seascapes. A very appreciative paragraph from Anderson’s “Pictorial Arts of Japan” may be quoted here:—

“The Chinese artist was often remarkably felicitous in the renderings of the wilder forms of picturesque beauty in landscape. Silvery cascades; tranquil pools and winding streams; towering silicic peaks and rugged headlands; gnarled fantastic pines and plum-trees, side by side with the graceful forms and feathery foliage of the bamboo; mansions or pavilions, gorgeous in vermilion and gold, crowning the heights or bordering the expanse of an inland lake, and rustic cottages with straw-thatched roofs nestling in the cultivated valleys: these were elements that the painter could assort and reconstruct into a thousand pictures of never-failing interest and beauty. The Japanese painters of the classical schools, seduced by the charm of the foreign ideal, were often led to neglect the familiar attractions of their own scenery, and without having beheld any of the spots depicted by the old landscape masters of China, squandered an infinity of talent in building up new creations of their own with the material borrowed from their neighbours.”