Page:Japanese Wood Engravings.djvu/60

48 drawings in panoramic form were issued between 1710 and 1770. None of these essays, however, merit comparison with the handbooks of Shunchōsai and his followers. The Meizan dzu-yé of Tani Bunchō is an excellent supplement to the group of the Meisho dzu-yé, and contains many vigorous sketches of the mountain scenery of Japan.

The illustrations of these works as a class are very spirited, and, notwithstanding the absence of light and shade and the defects of perspective, conveyed a vivid and faithful impression of the scenes depicted. The figures introduced into the landscape, street, or building were admirably grouped, and the more idealised pictorial transcripts of history and folk-lore were well composed and told their story with good effect. The introduction of arbitrary cloud forms used for decorative purposes by the masters of the ancient Japanese school was adopted for convenience in the "Meisho" drawings, partly to exclude unnecessary details, and partly to secure a space for descriptive text. The picture, when large enough to cover two pages, was divided into halves, and where the range of view was unusually wide, the design often extended in segments over three, four, or more pages, a separate block being necessarily used for each page.

Works of this class, commencing with the Isé Monogatari in 1608 and the Hogen Monogatari in 1629, were apparently in the first instance engraved transcripts of classical volumes which had previously been multiplied by manuscripts, and the illustrations were copied from the paintings that were made to accompany the written text. The woodcuts in both cases showed all the characters of the formal pictures of the old native or Yamato school, even to the introduction of fictitious clouds traversing the foreground, a convention originally devised merely as a surface for decorative masses of gold or colour, but preserved by the book artists at first in simple imitation of the model, and afterwards for the convenience of covering spaces in the design which he did not care to fill with detail. In the guide-book of the last hundred years the clouds are the etceteras of the draughtsman.

The early volumes, often works of some pretension, were of octavo