“About this time also appeared a magazine entitled ‘Meisho Zuye’ (‘Sonnets on Yedo Scenes’), a monthly, illustrated by Hiroshige, and displaying his wonderful skill with the brush, to the admiration of the world. He passed away, to the world beyond, on the sixth day of the ninth month of this year, 1858, at the ripe age of sixty-two (sixty-one by our count). He left behind a last testament, or farewell sonnet, ‘Azuma ji ni fude wo no-koshite tabi no sora; Nishi no mi kuni no Meisho wo Mimu.’ (Dropping the brush at Azuma, Eastern Capital, I go the long journey to the Western Country, Buddhist Heaven is in the West, to view the wonderful sceneries there; perchance to limn them too.)
“This by Temmei Rojin, picture by Toyokuni.
“Dated, Ansei 5, ninth month (October, 1858).”
The best known prints by Hiroshige are the “Fifty-three Stations between Yedo and Kyoto.” This Tokaido series was at first beautifully printed, but the later impressions show a sad decay in the colouring. The “Yedo Haik’kei” or “Hundred Views of Yedo,” give a panoramic vista of the Shoguns’ capital. The pictorial description of Yedo, in black and pale blue, is a lovely series. In many of these landscapes the Dutch influence is very marked, for the master of Hiroshige, Toyohiro, from whom he derived the first syllable of his nom-de-pinceau, had experimented in landscape painting after the Dutch wood-cuts which were scattered throughout the country. Although Hiroshige is best known through his landscapes, he, like most Japanese painters, was too universal an artist to confine himself solely to one branch. He loved every phase of nature, and in one of his well-known prints, “The Eagle,” his skill in the delineation of birds is best shown. In the later impressions a pale yellowish tone takes the place of the beautiful steel-blue background of the earlier prints, miracles of colour printing.
Athwart this background of ineffable blue, which loses itself in the mists that veil the sacred mountain, is seen, sweeping and sailing cruelly alert, the evil eagle of Hiroshige. His wicked gaze is set on nests of murmuring wood-doves, he eyes the callow sea-birds in their bed of rushes. The temple bell rings solemnly; the long vibrations cleave the azure dusk. It is the hour of rest and dreams. Begone, base harbinger of evil!
In the early prints by Hiroshige the colours are most beautiful, one soft tone fading imperceptibly into another, the blues and greens so marvellously blended as to be almost interchangeable. We are told that Michelangelo loved the companionship of the old workman who ground his colours; and of the Japanese, it is said, “this making one family of the greater artist and all who had to do with him has given that peculiar completeness, that sense of peace and absence of struggle which we feel in Japanese art.”
In vain Hiroshige fought, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, against introduction of cheap and inferior pigments, which were taking the place of the native dyes—Nature’s gifts, distilled by her artist children. Reds, yellows, blues and greens, intense and crude, were now imported, and Western commercialism sapped the virtue of the sincere and devoted artists and artisans of the Orient.
In describing the effect of colour in one of the Nikko temples, W. B. Van Ingen throws a searchlight upon the chemical secrets of this splendour, which he tells us, if asked to describe in one word, that word would be “golden.” “These colours,” he says, “are not imitations of colours. If vermilion is used, it is cinnabar and not commercialized vermilion which is employed, nor is something substituted for cobalt because it is cheaper and will ‘do just as well.’ Each colour is used because it is beautiful and frank as a colour, not because some other colour is beautiful. If lacquer is the best medium to display the beauty of the pigment, lacquer is used, and if water is better, lacquer is discarded, and if these colours are not imitations of colours, neither are they suggestions of colours. Pink is not used for red; if it is used at all, it is used for its own beauty, and feeble bluish washes are not made to do service for blue. The Oriental has not yet learned the doctrine of substitution; he knows that substitution is transformation.”
The secrets of colouring of the early prints, the joy of Parisian studios and which inspired Whistler, are lost. The delicious greens of old mosses, the pale rose tints, the veinings and marblings, the iridescent tints of ocean shells, the luminous colours of the anemone, the bleus malades des mauves—that divine violet, a benison of the palette handed down by those old Buddhist monks, the earliest painters of India and China.
These visions of colour are taking the place of obscurity and gloom, for the great impressionists, Claude Monet, Manet, the Barbizon school also and its disciples, have abjured the old dark shadows and substituted violet washes, seeming to share the privilege with the saints and sages of “seeing blue everywhere.” All true artists live “within the sphere of the infinite images of the soul.” These seers are their own masters, and, as Theodore Child says so exquisitely, “they are of rare and special temperaments, and through their temperament they look at nature and see beautiful personal visions. They fix their visions in colour or marble and then disappear forever, carrying with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual processes.” Such a special temperament was bequeathed to Whistler. He submitted himself to the Japanese influence, not imitating but imbibing oriental methods, and following them, notwithstanding Philistine clamour, for the English art doctrines of the time were diametrically opposed to these innovations. Regardless of sneers, he followed the bent of his genius, which led him into oriental fields. He felt the sweet influence of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige. He took advantage of the centuries of thought given to drapery, in the land where, as with Greece, dress is a national problem; where no fads and follies of fashion fostered by commercialism are allowed; where the artists design dress, and the people gratefully and sincerely adopt their ideas.