Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

Picture-buyers.

It is, then, the absolute duty of every picture-buyer, who has any regard for truth, and any interest in the future of art, to learn to study nature carefully, and to buy only that which is true and sincere, and let the pink and white school of dishonesty die of inanition.

In short, it is high time that educated people ceased to judge painting as they often do, by the standard of coloured rugs. This talk of “colour” is one of the stumbling-blocks of the weak-kneed in art. Colour is good so long as it is true, and no longer. A Persian rug, or Turkey carpet, is not the standard of colour whereby to judge pictures, and only those in the mental state of the frugivorous ape or the Arab craftsmen can think so.

Chinese and Japanese Art.

China and Japan.

In China and Japan things were very different. Following Mr. Anderson’s invaluable work, the “Pictorial Arts of Japan,” we find that their history of pictorial art begins about A.D. 457. |First period.| Mr. Anderson thinks, however, that art was only actually planted in Japan with the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century. |Buddhism.| Then it begins badly, for it was under the influence of religion, and in fact we read that the earliest art consisted of Buddhist images and mural decorations. This religious influence, together with a servile imitation of the Chinese masters, so enslaved art, that no development of importance took place till the end of the ninth century.

The “Ni Ō.”

Looking at the plate of the “Ni Ō,”—a wooden statue—considered the greatest work of the time, we can see the artist had really struggled to interpret nature, and no doubt studies were made from the nude, for the work on the anatomy could not otherwise have been so well expressed; but, good as it is, it runs in the Michael Angelo spirit, is exaggerated, and lacks entirely all the greatness of the Greek sculpture. This work—the greatest of what Mr. Anderson has called the first period—shows that there had been a struggle towards the expression of nature.

Second period.

The second period, we learn, ends with the fourteenth century, and is parallel, therefore, with the European mediæval period. On comparing plates of the Japanese work with that of the same period in Europe, we are forced to give the palm to the Japanese artists, they were, in fact, vastly superior. In looking at the plate of “The Death of Kosé No Hirotaka” we cannot but feel there was much more respect for nature in Japan than there was in Europe at that time, notwithstanding the fact that Buddhism bore the same relation to art in Japan as Christianity did in Europe. |Nobuzané.| We read also that in the twelfth century there was one, Nobuzané, who had a brilliant reputation for “portraits and other studies from Nature.” The specimen of Nobuzané’s work is admirable in expression, he has caught the living expression of his model, but the rest is conventional. |Chinese renascence.| We are told that the Chinese renascence began about 1275, and that the painters of this movement were naturalistic, “Ink sketches of birds and bamboos, portraits and landscapes were the subjects chosen,” and though these were only a kind of picture-writing, yet the movement led the artists more and more to study nature.