In marked contrast is one of the “Seven Impressions of Hakone.” A glad reveille. The sun breaks out, the clouds have burst asunder, masses of vapour float here and there. All is chaotic, untamed, a palette wildly mingled.
The Japanese so dearly love Nature, in all her moods, that when she dons her mantle of snow they hesitate, even when necessity compels, to sully its purity. In one of Utamaro’s prints, sweetly entitled by M. Edmond de Goncourt “La Nature Argentée,” a little musüme is seen searching the snowy landscape she loves, and, hating to blot the beautiful carpet, she cries, “Oh, the beautiful new snow! Where shall I throw the tea-leaves?” With Hiroshige, the artist of snow and mist, we feel this love, and so successfully, does he deal with a snowy landscape that we see the snow in masses, luminous, soft and unsullied, as if Nature had lent a helping hand to portray her pure white magic. So, without formula or technique, but absolutely and sincerely, he unrolls the winter pageant before us.
The Japanese landscape painter sums up nature in broad lines, to which all details are more or less subordinated. This rendering of the momentary vision of life and light,—the spirit, not the letter of the scene,—is what is meant by Impressionism. Whereas, however the French impressionists express light by modelling surfaces, the Japanese adhere rigidly to line, and rely upon gradations of colour and the effect of washes to produce the illusion of light. Their landscape is expressed in clear-cut lines and flat masses of colour. In the prints this virtue of abstract line is exemplified, the outline being the essential element of the composition, for upon line and arrangements of balanced colour the artist must depend, cramped as he is by the necessities of the wood-cut. And here he displays his wonderful ingenuity, his fineness of gradations and opposition, his boldness and infinity of device, and in spite of the limitations which hamper him, he realizes absolute values in the narrowest range, by virtue of his knowledge of lines and spaces.
Wistaria Viewing at Kameido. By Hiroshige.
“No scientifically taught artist,” said Jarves, “can get into as few square inches of paper a more distinct realization of space, distance, atmosphere, perspective and landscape generally, not to mention sentiment and feeling.”
This virtue of the line is the inheritance of the Japanese, the consummate handling of the brush almost a racial instinct. From China, far back in the centuries, came the sweeping calligraphic stroke, of which in Japan the school of Kano became the noblest exponent. “L’école,” said M. de Goncourt, “des audaces et de la bravoure du faire, l’école tantôt aux écrasements du pinceau, tantôt aux ténuités d’un cheveu.”
As soon as the tiny hand of the Japanese baby can grasp the brush its art education begins. The brush is the Japanese alphabet—it is their fairy wand, their playmate—they learn to paint intuitively, though later the most assiduous study is given to acquire the characteristic touch of the school with which they affiliate. The brush is their génie, subservient to their imagination; they master and “juggle” with it. For no foreign taught technique will they barter their birthright.
And our masters and instructors in art more and more recognize the value of initial brush-work. The following excerpt from Walter Crane, in Line and Form, might serve as a preface to a work on Hokusai or Hiroshige: “The practice of forming letters with the brush afforded a very good preliminary practice to a student of line and form. An important attribute of line is its power of expressing or suggesting movement. Undulating lines always suggest action and unrest or the resistance of force of some kind. The firm-set yet soft feathers of a bird must be rendered by a different touch from the shining scales of a fish. The hair and horns of animals, delicate human features, flowers, the sinuous lines of drapery, or the massive folds of heavy robes, all demand from the draughtsman in line different kinds of suggestive expression.”
We are told that Hiroshige began his career by making pictures in coloured sands on an adhesive background, to amuse the public, and perhaps this artistic juggling helped him later in arranging his schemes of colour, for the limitations of the block demanded almost equal simplicity in composition.