IX. PAINTING

Difficulties of the subject—Methods and materials—Forms and ideals—Korean origins and Buddhist inspiration—The Tosa School—The return to China—Sesshiu—The Kano School—Koyetsu and Korin—The Realistic School

Japanese painting, even more than the other topics that have demanded a place in these pages, is a subject that only specialists should touch; and if it is included here, along with other esoteric realms wherein angels have feared to tread, it is in the hope that through this veil of errors some glimpse may come, to the reader, of the fulness and quality of Japanese civilization. The masterpieces of Japanese painting cover a period of twelve hundred years, are divided amongst a complex multiplicity of schools, have been lost or injured in the flow of time, and are nearly all hidden away in private collections in Japan.* Those few chef-d’ œuvres that are open to alien study are so different in form, method, style and material from Western pictures that no competent judgment can be passed upon them by the Occidental mind.

First of all, like their models in China, the paintings of Japan were once made with the same brush that was used in writing, and, as in Greece, the word for writing and for painting was originally one; painting was a graphic art. This initial fact has determined half the characteristics of Far Eastern painting, from the materials used to the subordination of color to line. The materials are simple: ink or water-colors, a brush, and absorbent paper or silk. The labor is difficult: the artist works not erect but on his knees, bending over the silk or paper on the floor; and he must learn to control his stroke so as to make seventy-one different degrees or styles of touch.⁷³ In the earlier centuries, when Buddhism ruled the art of Japan, frescoes were painted, much in the manner of Ajanta or Turkestan; but nearly all the extant works of high repute take the form either of makimono(scrolls), kakemono (hangings), or screens. These pictures were made not to be arranged indigestibly in picture galleries—for there are no such galleries in Japan—but to be viewed in private by the owner and his friends, or to form a part of some decorative scheme in a temple, a palace or a home. They were very seldom portraits of specific personalities; usually they were glimpses of nature, or scenes of martial action, or strokes of humorous or satirical observation of the ways of animals, women and men.

They were poems of feeling rather than representations of things, and were closer to philosophy than to photography. The Japanese artist let realism alone, and rarely tried to imitate the external form of reality. He scornfully left out shadows as irrelevant to essences, preferring to paint inplein air, with no modeling play of light and shade; and he smiled at Western insistence on the perspective reduction of distant things. “In Japanese painting,” said Hokusai, with philosophic tolerance, “form and color are represented without any attempt at relief, but in European methods relief and illusion are sought for.”⁷⁴ The Japanese artist wished to convey a feeling rather than an object, to suggest rather than to represent; it was unnecessary, in his judgment, to show more than a few significant elements in a scene; as in a Japanese poem, only so much should be shown as would arouse the appreciative mind to contribute to the esthetic result by its own imagination. The painter too was a poet, and valued the rhythm of line and the music of forms infinitely more than the haphazard shape and structure of things. And like the poet he felt that if he were true to his own feeling it would be realism enough.

It was probably Korea that brought painting to the restless empire that now has conquered her. Korean artists, presumably, painted the flowing and colorful frescoes of the Horiuji Temple, for there is nothing in the known history of Japan before the seventh century that could explain the sudden native achievement of such faultless excellence. The next stimulus came directly from China, through the studies there of the Japanese priests Kobo Daishi and Dengyo Daishi; on his return to Japan in 806 Kobo Daishi gave himself to painting as well as to sculpture, literature and piety, and some of the oldest masterpieces are from his many-sided brush. Buddhism stimulated art in Japan, as it had done in China; the Zen practice of meditation lent itself to brooding creativeness in color and form almost as readily as in philosophy and poetry; and visions of Amida Buddha became as frequent in Japanese art as Annunciations and Crucifixions on the walls and canvases of the Renaissance. The priest Yeishin Sozu (d. 1017) was the Fra Angelico and El Greco of this age, whose risings and descendings of Amida made him the greatest religious painter in the history of Japan. By this time, however, Kose no-Kanaoka (fl. ca. 950) had begun the secularization of Japanese painting; birds, flowers and animals began to rival gods and saints on the scrolls.

But Kose’s brush still thought in Chinese terms, and moved along Chinese lines. It was not till the suspension of intercourse with China in the ninth century had given Japan the first of five centuries of isolation that she began to paint her own scenery and subjects in her own way. About 1150, under the patronage of imperial and aristocratic circles at Kyoto, a national school of painting arose which protested against imported motives and styles, and set itself to decorate the luxurious homes of the capital with the flowers and landscapes of Japan. The school had almost as many names as it had masters: Yamato-riu, or Japanese Style; Waga-riu, again meaning Japanese Style; Kasuga, after its reputed founder; and finally the Tosa School, after its principal representative in the thirteenth century, Tosa Gon-no-kumi; thereafter to the end of its history the name Tosa was borne by all the artists of the line. They deserved their nationalist name, for there is nothing in Chinese art that corresponds to the ardor and dash, the variety and humor, of the narrative scrolls of love and war which came from the brushes of this group. Takayoshi, about 1010, painted in colors gorgeous illustrations of the seductive tale of Genji; Toba Sojo amused himself by drawing lively satires of the priestly and other scoundrels of his time, under the guise of monkeys and frogs; Fujiwara Takanobu, towards the end of the twelfth century, finding his high lineage worthless in terms of rice and sake, turned to the brush for a living, and drew great portraits of Yoritomo and others, quite unlike anything yet done in China; his son Fujiwara Nobuzane patiently painted the portraits of thirty-six poets; and in the thirteenth century Kasuga’s son, Keion, or someone else, drew those animated scrolls which are among the world’s most brilliant achievements in the field of draughtsmanship.

Slowly these native sources of inspiration seemed to dry up into conventional forms and styles, and Japanese art turned once more for nourishment to the new schools of painting that had arisen in the China of the Sung Renaissance. The impulse to imitation was for a time uncontrolled; Japanese artists who had never seen the Middle Kingdom spent their lives in painting Chinese characters and scenes. Cho Densu painted sixteen Rakan (Lohans, Arhats, Buddhist saints), now among the treasures of the Freer Gallery in Washington; Shubun took the precaution of being born and reared in China, so that, on coming to live in Japan, he could paint Chinese landscapes from memory as well as from imagination.

It was during this second Chinese mood of Japanese painting that the greatest figure in all the pictorial art of Japan appeared. Sesshiu was a Zen priest at Sokokuji, one of the several art schools established by Yoshimitsu, the Ashikaga Shogun. Even as a youth he astonished his townsmen with his draughtsmanship; and legend, not knowing how to express its awe, told how, when he was tied to a post for misbehavior, he had drawn with his toes such realistic mice that they came to life and bit through the cords that bound him.⁷⁵ Hungry to know the masters of Ming China at first hand, he secured credentials from his religious superiors as well as from the Shogun, and sailed across the sea. He was disappointed to find that Chinese painting was in decay, but he consoled himself with the varied life and culture of the great kingdom, and went back to his own land filled and inspired with a thousand ideas. The artists and nobles of China, says a pretty tale, accompanied him to the vessel which was to take him back to Japan, and showered white paper upon him with requests that he should paint a few strokes, if no more, upon them and send them back; hence, according to this story, his pen name Sesshiu, meaning “Ship of Snow.”⁷⁶ Arrived in Japan, he seems to have been welcomed as a prince, and to have been offered many emoluments by the Shogun Yoshimasa; but (if we may believe what we read) he refused these favors, and retired to his country parish in Choshu. Now he threw off, as if each were a moment’s trifle, one masterpiece after another, until nearly every phase of Chinese scenery and life had taken lasting form under his brush. Seldom had China, never had Japan, seen paintings so various in scope, so vigorous in conception and execution, so decisive in line. In his old age the artists of Japan made a path to his door and honored him, even before his death, as a supreme artist. Today a picture of Sesshiu is to a Japanese collector what a Leonardo is to a European; and legend, which transforms intangible opinions into pretty tales, tells how one possessor of a Sesshiu, finding himself caught in a conflagration beyond possibility of escape, slashed open his body with his sword, and plunged into his abdomen the priceless scroll—which was later found unharmed within his half-consumed corpse.⁷⁷

The ascendancy of Chinese influence continued among the many artists patronized by the feudal lords of the Ashikaga and Tokugawa Shogunates. Each baronial court had its official painter, who was commissioned to train hundreds of young artists who might be turned, at a moment’s notice, to the decoration of a palace. The temples now were almost ignored, for art was being secularized in proportion as wealth increased. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Kano Masanobu established at Kyoto, under Ashikaga patronage, a school of secular painters known from his first name, and devoted to upholding the severely classical and Chinese traditions in Japanese art. His son, Kano Motonobu, reached in this direction a mastery second only to that of Sesshiu himself. A story told of him illustrates admirably the concentration of mind and purpose that constitutes the greater part of genius. Having been commissioned to paint a series of cranes, Motonobu was discovered, evening after evening, walking and behaving like a crane. It turned out that he imitated, each night, the crane that he planned to paint the following day. A man must go to bed with his purpose in order to wake up to fame. Motonobu’s grandson, Kano Yeitoku, though a scion of the Kano line, developed under the protection of Hideyoshi an ornate style all the world away from the restrained classicism of his progenitors. Tanyu transferred the seat of the school from Kyoto to Yedo, took service under the Tokugawas, and helped to decorate the mausoleum of Iyeyasu at Nikko. Gradually, despite these adaptations to the spirit of the times, the Kano dynasty exhausted its impetus, and Japan turned to other masters for fresh beginnings.

About 1660 a new group of painters arrived on the scene, named, from its leaders, the Koyetsu-Korin School. In the natural oscillation of philosophies and styles, the Chinese manners and subjects of Sesshiu and Kano seemed now conservative and worn out; and the new artists turned to domestic scenes and motives for their subject-matter and inspiration. Koyetsu was a man of such diverse talents as bring to mind Carlyle’s jealous claim that he had never known any great man who could not have been any sort of a great man; for he was distinguished as a calligrapher, a painter, and a designer in metal, lacquer and wood. Like William Morris he inaugurated a revival of fine printing, and supervised a village in which his craftsmen pursued their varied arts under his direction.⁷⁸ His only rival for the first place among the painters of the Tokugawa age was Korin, that astonishing master of trees and flowers, who, his contemporaries tell us, could with one stroke of his brush place a leaf of iris upon the silk and make it live.⁷⁹No other painter has been so purely and completely Japanese, or so typically Japanese in the taste and delicacy of his work.*

The last of the historic schools of Japanese painting in the strictest sense was founded at Kyoto in the eighteenth century by Maruyami Okyo. A man of the people, Okyo, stimulated by some knowledge of European painting, resolved to abandon the now thinned-out idealism and impressionism of the older style, and to attempt a realistic description of simple scenes from everyday life. He became especially fond of drawing animals, and kept many species of them about him as objects of his brush. Having painted a wild boar, he showed his work to hunters, and was disappointed to find that they thought his pictured boar was dead. He tried again and again, until at last they admitted that the boar might not be dead but merely asleep.⁸¹ Since the aristocracy at Kyoto was penniless, Okyo had to sell his pictures to the middle classes; and this economic compulsion had much to do with turning him to popular subjects, even to the painting of some Kyoto belles. The older artists were horrified, but Okyo persisted in his unconventional ways. Mori Sosen accepted Okyo’s naturalistic lead, turned and lived with the animals in order to portray them faithfully, and became Japan’s greatest painter of monkeys and deer. By the time Okyo died (1795) the realists had won all along the line, and a completely popular school had captured the attention not only of Japan but of the world.