Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/16

Rh Arthur Morrison collection of Japanese art, if you wish to feel the real old Japanese humanity and love that our ancient masters inspired into their work. To be sure, none of the things exhibited there, small or large, good or poor, are so-called exhibition pictures, which are often a game of artistic charlatans. In real Japanese art you should not look for variety of subjects; but when you find an astonishing richness of execution, certainly it is the time when your eyes begin to open toward another sort of asceticism in art. How glad I am that our Japanese art, at least in the olden time, never degenerated into a mechanical art!

What a pity Sesson's "Travellers at a Temple Gate," this remarkable little thing, has been mended in two or three spots. If you wish to see the real power and distinction of great Sesshu, you might compare his "Daruma" in the exhibition with the other "Daruma" pictures by Soami and Takuchu also in the exhibition: the point I should like to bring out is that Sesshu's "Daruma" is an artistic attempt to proclaim the spiritual intensity which shines within from the true strength of consciousness and real economy of force, while the others are rather a superficial demonstration.

There is no other Japanese school so interesting, even from the one point of style in expressive decoration, as the Koyetsu-korin school,