The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the artists of older ages. The battle against “brown sauce” even formed an essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line taught by traditional rules of beauty.

But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward, independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey, the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the atmosphere did not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising power. Even Madox Brown’s “Work” is an offensive chaos of crying colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was harsh and crude.

HOKUSAI.FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH REEDS.

Of Menzel’s pictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he tried to paint smoke and steam in his “Iron Mill,” he had no understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His “Piazza d’Erbe” as well as his “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army” have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in photography or black and white do they acquire something of the simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his drawings may stand beside the sketches of Dürer without detriment; to place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and pure harmony are wanting in them.

So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour. Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and undisciplined.

The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.

Quantin, Paris.
HOKUSAI.AN APPARITION.

In the year in which Millet exhibited his “Winnower” and Courbet painted his “Stone-breakers” a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai. He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a thousand years old—one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian, though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word. Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a remarkable land “towards the sunrise,” the soil of which it was not permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols, pagodas, and “stuffs printed with flowers.” In a short time these works formed an important part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious, full of movement, for everything by which the charming Louis XV style is to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of Louis XIV. In the sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to Japanese art as such.

HOKUSAI.HOKUSAI SKETCHING THE PEERLESS MOUNTAIN.

As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness. Japanese pictures, kakemonos, are painted in water colour or Chinese ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasion offers, in the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the pictures.