TANYU.THE GOD HOTEÏ ON A JOURNEY.

As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen, crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being, just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist. Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes, ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts taken jointly—in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery, and pottery—they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited draughtsmen in existence.

Studio.
KORIN.LANDSCAPE.

Studio.Cassell & Co.
KORIN.RABBITS.OKIO.A CARP.

The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at any time the vogue.

The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a memory fast—the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits, the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive grace, the esprit of the brush hovering over objects, extracting merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element, without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant, fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented. And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and yet it is as if the waves were rocking the ship. The billow swells, rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe. The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything, producing the poetic illusion of distance.