Painting.
Pictorial art, judged from a European standard, can scarcely be said to exist in Japan; the drawing of landscape, figures, animals, etc., is essentially conventional. Japanese artists learn rather to write than to draw their sketches. They may indeed be called pictorial calligraphists, and in Japan the calligraphist, pure and simple, is almost as much honoured as his colleague of the brush. They seldom, if ever, drew from nature, but for centuries were content to copy Chinese masters, and down to the present time, with one or two remarkable exceptions, may be said to have remained pupils of the Chinese in execution and style. Their method of conventionalizing nature, and treating everything flatly, destroyed their pictorial art, and produced a decorative effect. Ignorant of chiaroscuro, the play of shadows, and the relief which by their use one can give to objects, scenes, and landscapes, they paint all in flat tones as one paints a vase; it is not a picture which they execute on the sized silk, it is a decoration, and it is as a decorative process that painting in Japan must be considered. They have imposed upon themselves from the earliest times a style which they have copied from the Chinese. The more Chinese, the nearer it approached their idea of perfection. The old kakemonos are direct copies from the Chinese, and go back to the introduction of art into Japan, and down to the present time the Japanese have chiefly occupied themselves in imitating and reproducing them with almost mathematical precision. The merit of their art, if we may call it such, lies in their method, which, by repeated copying, gives them such accuracy, such perfect touch, and such mastery over the brush. They are feeble in conception, inimitable in execution; masters in the matter of taste, when the human figure is out of the question. In their rough and rapid sketches of birds, flowers, and fish they are perfect, especially in the delicacy of execution and masterly blending of colours.
According to Mr. W. Anderson, late of H.B.M.’s Legation, Japan,[1] pictorial art in Japan begins as early as the fifth century of our era, by the arrival of a Chinese painter of imperial descent; but whatever pictorial art existed up to the ninth century could not be considered really Japanese, as the few native painters whose names are given in their writings were at best but skilful amateurs. The first true Japanese artist was Kose-no-Kanaoka, a court noble of ancient lineage, who founded the Kanaoka School (riu). At this time three schools of painting had been made known by foreign intercourse: Kara-ye, or Chinese; Korai-ye, or Corean; and the Butsu-ye, or Buddhist pictures, wholly distinct in style from the first two, and probably of Indian birth. Motomitsu is spoken of as the originator of the Yamato-ye, or Japanese School. In the thirteenth century we find Takuma Tameyuki, a court painter, who is referred to as the chief of the Takuma riu, a school which does not differ in any important respect from that of Motomitsu. At the beginning of this century commenced the great Tosa riu, which was the outcome of the Yamato and Takuma schools, and which exists at the present time. In the beginning of the fifteenth century we hear of Zhiyosetsu, a Chinese priest, who came to Japan and established a kind of monastic school at the Temple of Soukokuzhi in Kiôto. Three of his pupils, Sesshiu, Shiubun, and Kano Masanobu became famous; the latter is still venerated as the father of modern art in Japan.
Tosa Mitsunobu, the founder of the Tosa riu, was a superintendent of paintings. The followers of this school are highly celebrated as colourists and paint with a fine-pointed brush.
- ↑ ‘Transactions of the A. S. Soc. of Japan,’ vol. vii. p. 4.
