The leading schools of Japanese painting are the Buddhist, Yamato-Tosa. Chinese, Sesshiu Kano, Matahei (popular), Korin, Shijō (naturalistic), and Ukiyo; each of these has well-marked characteristics preserved even to the present day.
The art of Japan was to a great extent founded upon, and is in certain directions a development of, that of the older civilisation of China. The earliest artist, therefore, recorded in Japanese annals, is a Chinese, Nanriu by name, of royal descent, who came to Japan about the end of the fifth century; but of this master, and of his immediate successors, there are no known examples.
It was in the succeeding century, upon the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, that we find the first establishment of a school of Japanese art, initiated by the Chinese and Coreans, and dedicated to the mural decoration of Buddhistic temples.
From the sixth to the ninth centuries, the history of Japanese painting is more or less clouded in doubt, and the first great artist who emerges from the general obscurity is Kanaoka (ninth century), although the few examples extant which are attributed to this painter are doubted by the best experts.
The Yamato-Tosa school, though the direct outcome of the study of Chinese methods, was essentially Japanese and naturalistic in character, and was founded by Kasuga Motomitsu in the latter part of the tenth century.
In the thirteenth century Tsunetaka, son of Kasuga Mitsunaga, assumed the name of Tosa and gave to the Yamato school the name it has since retained.
An important movement set in at the beginning of the fifteenth century, no less than a Chinese renaissance. For centuries Chinese influence had been waning, and the national style of Yamato and Tosa had held the field.
| Hotei and the Children. by Kanō Shō-Yei, 1591. | Mr Wilson Crewdson. |