Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/52

28 the latter, and both are to be traced to the political and economical conditions of the time rather than to any independent art impulse. The whole period of the Tokugawa Regency’s sway—that is to say, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first half of the nineteenth—was marked by profound peace and by the spread of luxurious habits hitherto confined to the great administrative families in the Imperial capital. The applied arts certainly attained their highest development during those centuries, and it is probably safe to say that in no other country nor at any other epoch, ancient or modern, were the services of pictorial art so widely and so successfully employed for decorative purposes. We can trace, too, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, a patriotic reaction against the slavish adherence of the classical schools to Chinese motives and methods, and a growing impulse to favour the work of the Tosa masters, who chose Japanese subjects and attached to the decorative quality in their pictures importance which brought them into close touch with the architectural developments of the time. Doubtless this taste for exquisite harmonies of colour and glowing yet tender tints, grand illustrations of which may be seen in the interior decoration of temples, palaces and mansions, owed something to a contemporaneous change in Chinese pictorial methods—a change from the noble simplicity and force of the Tang, Sung and Yuan monochromes to the strong, full-bodied colours and microscopically elaborate style of the later Ming pictures. But the influence of Chinese artists was not a prime factor in the movement; it must be regarded, rather, as a reflection of the development of Japanese civilization under the Tokugawa Regents, the tendency, if not the aim, of whose policy was to cultivate the growth of an effeminate, splendour-loving mood among the aristocratic classes in lieu of the fiercely ambitious temper of mediæval militarism.

We arrive now at the Ukiyo-ye Riu, or “Popular School” as it has been generally called by Western critics. The word ukiyo literally signifies “floating world;” that is to say, this transient world, or every-day life. Hence, when a Japanese speaks of ukiyo-ye (ye signifies picture) he means simply genre paintings—representations of persons and things that belong to the ephemeral scenes among which the artist moves. It is generally alleged that the so-called Popular School owed its origin to Iwasa Matahei, a painter who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century. But the statement is somewhat misleading. A careful reader of what has been written above will see that, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, incidents of national life furnished to the Tosa masters their chief motives, and that, down to the Chinese renaissance in the fifteenth century, artists did not hesitate to seek subjects for delineation in the daily doings of the plebeian classes. Even the great founders of the Kano School, men whose works support comparison with the masterpieces of Chinese genius, had no fear of degrading their art or alienating aristocratic patronage when they depicted episodes from the kitchen, the stable, the farm-yard and the work-shop. The truth is that in the rise and development of the