Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/116

Rh most distinctly seen in one of his pictures in this exhibition called "The Young Sorrow" (the owner of this picture is Mr. Takashi Matsuda, one of a few great art collectors in Japan), in which a young sitting nude woman shows only her beautiful back, her face being covered by her hands. What a sad, visionary, pale clarification in colour and tone! Hara writes down when his mind was saturated with Watts at Tate's or somewhere else: "What an indescribable sense of beauty! Art is indeed my only world and life. Again look at the pictures. How tender, how soft, and how warm in tone and atmosphere! And how deep is the shadow of the pictures! And that deep shadow is never dirty." Again he writes down on his visit to Tate's on a certain day: "It was wrong that I attempted to bring out all the colours from the beginning at once, and even tried to finish the work up by mending. There is no wonder my colours were dead things. We must have the living beauty and tone of colours; by that I do never mean showy. I must learn how to get the deep colour by light paint." While he was saturated with Watts, he on the other hand was copying Rembrandt at the National Gallery. Hara's copy of "The Jewish Merchant" is now owned by the Imperial Household in Tokyo. This copy and a few other copies of Rembrandt were in the exhibition. And Hara was a great admirer of Turner. Markino confesses in his book or books that it was Hara who first opened his spiritual eyes to Turner. At this memorial exhibition Turner is represented by Hara's copy of Venice. There was in the exhibition "The Old Seamstress," which I was