It is a habit among connoisseurs to divide into three great streams the flood of Chinese renaissance that invaded Japan in the fifteenth century; the purely Chinese stream, of which we have just spoken as springing from Josetsu and Shiubun; the Sesshiu stream, springing from Sesshiu, whom many count the most colossal figure in Japanese art; and the Kano stream springing from Masanobu and Motonobu, who, whether they rank above or below Sesshiu, certainly founded the chief academy of Japanese painters. The reader will at once seek some explanation of the reasons underlying this division. It is difficult to give any that can be called satisfactory. As to Sesshiu, some Japanese connoisseurs claim that he developed a peculiar style of his own, untrammelled by classical traditions. We can only say that to Occidental eyes this independence is not apparent. He adhered to Chinese motives and Chinese methods as faithfully as did Shiubun and his disciples, and to us no dictum appears truer than that Sesshiu was “the open door through which all contemporary and subsequent artists looked into the seventh heaven of Chinese genius.” Masanobu and Motonobu, the founders of the Kano School, were not less “classic” than Sesshiu. In the works of all three masters, though in varying degree, we find the noble breadth of design, the subtle relationship of tones, the splendid caligraphic force and the “all pervading sense of poetry” that constituted the highest features of Chinese pictorial art in the Tang, Sung and Yuan epochs. For all purposes of true appreciation it seems sufficient to say that the fifteenth century was the culminating period of Chinese pictorial art in Japan, and that its giant figures, Shiubun, Sesshiu, Masanobu, and Motonobu, though they stand at the head of three distinct lines of artists, drew their inspiration from the same source and set before themselves the same ideals. Motonobu’s masterpieces had the special excellence of being free from the hard outlines that in Sesshiu’s pictures offend against natural laws; but this superiority is partly balanced by loss of vigour and massiveness.
Our object here being to trace the development of Japanese art itself, not the history of Japanese artists, we leave unnoticed the names of several great disciples upon whom the mantle of the four renaissance masters fell, and pass at once to the closing years of the sixteenth century when a new departure was made by two leaders of the Kano School, Eitoku and Sanraku. It has been shown above that pure Chinese influence reached its first culminating point in the ninth century, when Kose no Kanaoka won immortal fame, and that his classical style continued to monopolise the field of pictorial art until the eleventh century, when Motomitsu founded the Yamato, or Japanese, School, which subsequently developed decorative characteristics, and finally, in the hands of the Tosa masters, became more remarkable for rich colour harmonies and gorgeous illuminations than for any of the qualities recognised by classical canons. So, too, we find that the re-birth of Chinese influence in the fifteenth century, which speedily reached the zenith of its glory in the hands of Sesshiu, was followed, within less than two hundred years,
