Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/87

82 in Japan, even while we admit that we have the buyers? I will take a few pictures with me when I go to England next, and show them to the right sort of people; really, truly, only London of all the cities of the world has the right sort of people in any line of profession. Besides, I should like to examine the English art again and let the people there listen to my opinion; I was not enough prepared for such a work when I went there last."

But I believe that his own self-education in art, which he most determinedly started at the National Gallery, where he was forcibly attracted by Rembrandt and Velasquez, must have been happily developed, when the same Graphic critic spoke of his "sensitive and searching eyes," and (printing Hara's intelligent rendering of Rembrandt's "Jewish Merchant" on the page) said that it proved the painter was at the root of the matter, and declared that the critic had rarely seen better or more intelligent copy, and again to prove that Hara was not merely a copyist or imitator, he also reproduced on the same page his original work called "The Old Seamstress." And I am doubly pleased to find that the same English critic mentioned him somewhere as a "keen and acute critic, but generous withal"; I was so glad to have Hara as my friend for the rare striking power of his critical enlightenment (Oh, where is another sane artist like himself?),