Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/76

46 written by him on the eve of the final act: a simply worded and brief confession that he had erred in the sight of the law, and that his transgression involved the further crime of taking the life which he owed to his parents and ought to have preserved for their sakes. A strangely sounding voice from the past must this have seemed to many of those that 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 we have to speak, but rather of those showing traces of Western influence. There were many such. The subjects were not distinctly foreign, if we except some studies of animal life; 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 foreign methods. But he did not carry this tendency to the length of attracting political censorship. He showed it rather in the undefined though still palpable manner of the modern master Watanabe Seitei, who enjoys in Europe and America the highest, though not, perhaps, the most highly deserved, reputation of any living Japanese artist. The hybrid school of the present day, however, goes far beyond the dubious adaptations of Hokusai or Seitei. It has proposed to itself the same problem that Watanabe Kwazan partially solved sixty years ago—the problem of preserving the characteristics of Japanese painting while adopting all the technical teachings of the West. Hashimoto Gaho stands at the head of this school. He has talent sufficient to secure partial success for any effort. But if there be any justice in the estimate here set down of the distinctive characteristics of Japanese pictorial art, we must conclude that to marry it to the art of the West would be to deprive it of its individuality.