Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/68

40, both are nothing more than great representatives of the naturalistic sentiment of the era, and both are differentiated from their Ukiyo-ye contemporaries chiefly by the fact that they never devoted their talents to the purposes of the wood-cut or the chromo-xylograph. In force, grace, tenderness and accuracy of line Okio has no superior among Japanese artists.

He went direct to nature for instruction, but into all his exquisite pictures of birds, flowers, grasses, fish, insects, quadrupeds and figures, he introduced a subjective element as eloquent as it is indescribable. It has been said that his drawing of the human figure showed all the anatomical errors of his predecessors, but it must also be said that the question of anatomy never presents itself for a moment in connection with his pictures, and that one has no more inclination to criticise his manner of articulating bones and moulding muscles than one has to remember the surgical solecisms of Michael Angelo or Delacroix. With the exceptions of Mori Sosen and Kano Tanyu, no artist has ever been so assiduously copied in Japan as Okio. Forgeries of his works exist in hundreds, but the originals remain always unapproachable. An eminent critic calls Ganku “stupendous,” and describes him as “the only artist of recent times worthy to be ranked on a level with the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” Without disputing that verdict, not many, we think, will be found to confirm it from their own observation. Ganku died just sixty-two years ago (1838). Numbers of his works remain. The best of them seem to be those that show most clearly the impress of the naturalistic tendency to which Okio so powerfully contributed; but if his countrymen be asked to indicate his title to fame they invariably refer to his delineations of the tiger. Now it may safely be asserted that Ganku never saw a real, live tiger: never had an opportunity of studying its anatomy