Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/69

64 of study displayed in the first two volumes, in which he shows encyclopedically the delicate shades of variety of nearly all Japanese artists acknowledged great, from Kanaoka down to Kuniyoshi, also specimens of Chinese masters inserted at intervals. When I say that his artistic study was thorough even in the modern sense, I mean he always went straight to Nature and reality to fulfil what the pictures of old masters failed to tell him. Kyosai Gwaden tells, as an early adventure in Nature study, how he hid in a cupboard a human head which he picked up from a swollen river and horrified the family with his attempt to sketch it in his ninth year; when fire broke out and swept away even his own house, he became an object of condemnation, as he acted as if it were the affair of somebody else, and was seen serenely sketching the sudden clamour of the fire scene. The books contain somewhere a page or two of unusually amusing sketches of his students at work on different living objects, from a frog and turtle to cocks and fishes; Kyosai's love of fun in exaggeration (indeed exaggeration is one of the traits conspicuous even in his most serious work) again is seen in the sketches, when he made a monkey play at gymnastics and pull the hair of the earnest student with the brush. I often ask myself the question of the real merit of realism in our Japanese art, and further the question how much Kyosai gained from his