Masters of Art - Katsushika Hokusai

by Katsushika Hokusai

  Plum Branch Ball Battledore and Shuttlecock

  Plum Tree and Bamboo Grass

  Poet No. 1

  Poet No. 10

  Poet No. 11

  Poet No. 12

  Poet No. 13

  Poet No. 14

  Poet No. 15

  Poet No. 16

  Poet No. 17

  Poet No. 18

  Poet No. 19

  Poet No. 2

  Poet No. 20

  Poet No. 3

  Poet No. 4

  Poet No. 5

  Poet No. 6

  Poet No. 7

  Poet No. 8

  Poet No. 9

  Poet Tozando Bokuryo in Contemplation in His Studio

  Poetry Contest with Courtiers

  Poetry Recital

  Poppies

  Practicing Joruri Singing at Home

  Pregnant Boy

  Prostitute and Client

  Puppeteer Holding a Puppet on a Go Board

  Reading Book in the Yoshiwara

  Returning Sails at Yabase

  River Scene in Edo

  Rooster Hen and Chicken

  Rooster Hen Chicks and Blossoming Azalea Bushes

  Ryogoku

  Sabre Removal

  Sakai Cho

  Sash Pulling

  Second Month Lion Dance

  Sei Shonagon

  Seven Gods of Good Fortune

  Seventh Month The Bon Festival Dance

  Shellfish Gathering

  Shinobazu

  Shinobazu Pond

  Shinobazu Pond and Ueno

  Shrike and Blessed Thistle

  Shrike and Bluebird with Begonia and Wild Strawberry

  Shrimp and Seaweed

  Six Women Seated Around a Bird Cage

  Sixth Month Washing the Portable Shrine

  Smoking Opium

  Snail Race

  Snow at Dusk at Hira

  Snow at Nose in Settsu Province

  Snow at Saga in Yamashiro Province

  Snow at Shinagawa in Edo

  Snow on the Sumida River

  Sojo Henjo

  Sparrows on Millstones with Hagi Bushes

  Spools and Purse

  Stepping on a Board

  Sunset Glow at Jungai

  Suruga Cho

  Susaki

  Takanawa

  Tea Ceremony

  Tea Time

  Temple Bell

  Tenpozan at the Mouth of the Aji River in Settsu Province

  Tenth Month The Sparrow Dance

  The Afternoon Break

  The Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido Road

  The Boys Festival

  The Care-of-the-aged Falls in Mino Province

  The Chofu Jewel River

  The Drum Bridge at Kameido Tenjin Shrine

  The Eastern Journey of the Celebrated Poet Ariwara no Narihira

  The Falling Mist Waterfall at Mount Kurokami

  The Falls at Aoigaoka in the Eastern Capital

  The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji

  The Ghost of Oiwa

  The Hanging-cloud Bridge at Mount Gyodo near Ashikaga

  The Kannon of the Pure Waterfall at Sakanoshita

  The Kintai Bridge in Suo Province

  The Mansion of the Plates

  The Minister Toru

  The Morning After

  The Negociation

  The Pregnant Young Widow

  The Roben Falls at Oyama in Sagami Province

  The Sacred Fountain at Castle Peak

  The Seven Gods of Fortune

  The Seven Gods of Good Fortune in a Lion Dance

  The Six States of Woman

  The Sound of the Lake at Rinkai

  The Suspension Bridge on the Border of Hida and Etchu Provinces

  The Swordsmith Munechika and the God of Inari

  The Tenman Bridge in Settsu Province

  The Togetsu Bridge at Arashiyama in Yamashiro Province

  The Tone River in Shimosa Province

  The Waterfall at Ono on the Kisokaido Road

  The White Hare of Inaba and the Crocodiles

  Third Month Portable Parade Float and Small Accessories

  Three Festivals in the Year of the Earth-Sheep

  Three Turtles in Water

  Three Way Wrestling

  Three Women Reaching for Shuttlecock

  Three Women Tagging Cranes

  Thunderstorm

  Transplanting Rice Seedlings

  Traveler in Snow

  Travelers Asking for Directions

  Travelers Tea House

  Traveling Hat with Spring Greens

  Treasure Boat Laden with Rice Bales and Warehouses

  Treating Sore Feets

  Tugging at a Kite

  Turtles and Reflected Plum Branch

  Twelve Month Procession of the Ambassador

  Two Beauties Standing on Top of Hill

  Two Carp in Waterfall

  Two Court Ladies Pulling Flower Cart

  Two Girls Gathering New Greens

  Two Girls Looking Down at a Well

  Two Women and Small Child Catching Goldfish

  Two Women Playing Hand Puppets of Noroma and Soroma

  Two Women Spooling Silk

  Uraga in Sagami Province

  View of Enoshima

  View of Honmoku off Kanagawa

  View of Koshigoe from Shichiri-ga-hama

  View of Mount Fuji from Izawa Village

  Viewing Votive Paintings

  Views of Paddies Seen from Nihon Embankment

  Visiting the Myoken Shrine

  Visitors to the Inari Shrine at Oji

  Warbler and Roses

  Warrior Carrying Horse

  Water Prank

  Welcoming a Traveler on Boat House

  Whaling off the Goto Islands

  Wheeled Writing Table

  Winter Landscape

  Wisteria and Wagtail

  Woman and Snow Cock

  Woman Child and Man with Kyte

  Woman Cleaning Fish as Another Woman Reads a Book

  Woman Folding Cloth

  Woman Folding Kimono

  Woman Looking at Kite with Picture of Bell

  Woman Washing Her Face

  Woman with Two Children and Monkey

  Women Imitating the Story of Narihira at Yatsuhashi

  Women Preparing Tea Around the Fire-Holder

  Wooden Tubs at the Bathhouse

  Wrestling Time

  Yahagi Bridge at Okazaki on the Tôkaidô Road

  Yam Rubbing

  Yoshitsune’s Horse Washing Falls at Yoshino

  Yoshiwara

  Young Girl Dancing at a Nobleman’s Mansion

  Young Lady with Lamp

  Young Man Setting Out

  Young Woman and Little Girl Playing Musashi

  Young Women Entering the Garden of a Horticulturist

  The Biography

  Portrait of Hokusai by Keisai Eisen, c. 1840

  Hokusai by C. J. Holmes

  Published in London in 1898

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  HOKUSAI’S LIFE

  HOKUSAI’S PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

  HOKUSAI — THE PAINTER OF LIFE

  HOKUSAI — THE PAINTER OF LANDSCAPE

  CHARACTERISTICS OF HOKUSAI’S WORK

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PREFACE

  THOUGH Japan has had an important influence upon Western design for more than twenty years, that influence has not hitherto been as uniformly beneficial as might have been expected. Oriental art was first brought to Europe as a commercial speculation. It attracted attention at once by its novelty, and the available specimens, good, bad, and indifferent, were accepted and imitated with little or no discrimination. Thus the showy theatrical prints have a quite undeserved popularity, while the genius of the greater artists of Japan is recognised only by collectors. It is for collectors, too, that the extant literature of the subject has
been designed. The present series aims at a wider audience. It is only right, therefore, that the personality of a really great artist such as Hokusai, should be detached from the lesser men with whose work Japanese art is too commonly associated.

  The task of a writer who wishes to be essentially practical, can be little more than one of judicious selection. With this intention I have devoted only two chapters to history and biography; the first to give some idea of Hokusai’s relation to his forerunners, the second to show the conditions under which he lived and worked. A third chapter is devoted to Hokusai’s prints and drawings. Here I have tried to mention only those which people who are not collectors have a reasonable chance of seeing. For the remainder, Edmond de Goncourt’s book, in spite of minor inaccuracies, remains the one authority. The next two chapters deal with Hokusai as the painter of Life and of Landscape.

  Special attention is given to Landscape, as it is a province of the artist’s genius that will have an important influence on modern painting. Last comes a short note on the leading features of Hokusai’s design. This note may seem inadequate, but in the allotted space it was impossible to do more without embarking upon a field of technical discussion that is almost limitless, to the exclusion of matter more pertinent to the aim of the Series. After all, far more can be learned from the prints themselves than from any commentary; and if the reader can be induced to consult Hokusai at first hand, the book will have served its purpose. As I have explained elsewhere, fine Japanese prints photograph badly, so that the little engravings at the end of the volume cannot claim always to reproduce the subtler qualities of their originals. On such a small scale this is impossible; but, so long as the reader remembers that they are only illustrations of the text, he should not find them inadequate.

  In common with other students of Japanese art, I am indebted for much historical and bibliographical information to the works of Professor Anderson, Mr. E. F. Strange, Mr. Fenollosa, Herr Von Seidlitz, Mm. Edmond de Goncourt, L. Gonse, and M. Rèvon, the foundations on which all subsequent research must be based. For the materials placed at my disposal by certain personal friends I am still more grateful. I have also to thank Mr. C. H. Shannon for allowing me to reproduce a few of his unique drawings; and Mr. T. S. Moore, Mr. T. B. Lewis, and the authorities of South Kensington Museum, for similar permission in the case of books and prints.

  WESTMINSTER, August 1898

  INTRODUCTION

  THOSE who have studied the evolution of European painting must have been struck, and perhaps saddened, by the exceeding rarity of supreme pictorial success on a continent which, for the last thousand years, might be thought to have had a monopoly of the world’s culture. The intellectual activity of Asia during the same period has seemed little more than a vague rumour, which the political impotence of India and China appears to dissipate finally. To claim a place among the great masters for an Oriental artisan, unrecognised even by the connoisseurs of his own country, may therefore seem to convict the claimant of caprice, if not of wilful ignorance. Those unused to Japanese paintings and colour-prints are apt to pass them by as mere curiosities, interesting perhaps, but only one degree less remote and barbaric than the carved monsters on a Polynesian war-club. The mistake is not unnatural. Our own pictorial formulae and vehicles have so long been stereotyped by custom that we regard them as absolute laws, from which no deviation is possible. We forget that, in their outward decorative aspect, pictures are strictly limited by ever-changing material conditions, by the surroundings in which they are placed. Architecture being the true base of painting in common with the other arts of design, it follows that the scheme of tone and colour in a good picture is always adapted to a place in some building which the artist has, more or less definitely, in his mind’s eye. That for modern painters this building should generally be a large exhibition gallery is not the least of their misfortunes.

  Now the architecture of Japan is peculiar, a fact which has to be borne in mind when we criticise the national style of painting. The whole Archipelago is volcanic, and more or less violent earthquakes are exceedingly common. On more stable soils the energy of other artistic peoples has found effective vent in tall and solid edifices of brick or stone. In such a country these are an absurdity. The inhabitants have solved the difficulty by building light and elastic structures of timber, many of which have proved a match for the shocks of eight or more centuries. Though generally erected with an eye to their part in a scheme of landscape gardening, the temples and important buildings often display great beauty of design and detail. Dwelling-houses, on the other hand, are simple in the extreme — mere frames of wood, walled and divided into rooms by sliding lattices, panels, and screens. Furniture is reduced to a minimum. One or two kakemono (the tall “hanging-picture” familiar to collectors), with, perhaps, a single piece of choice porcelain, or lacquer signed by a great craftsman, supply all that is thought necessary in the way of decoration. Where all is so empty and spacious, paintings, being things of comparatively small size, must be striking and lively if the effect of the room is to escape the reproach of tameness. Thus arose the conventions that gave Japanese painting, and through it Japanese colourprinting, the peculiar qualities that make them so distinct from Western design.

  Hokusai, in his Treatise on Colouring (1848), mentions Dutch oil-painting and Dutch etching, with the criticism—” In Japanese art they render form and colour without aiming at relief; in the European process they seek relief and ocular illusion.” He concludes impartially by admitting both points of view. Indeed the Oriental position is not wholly indefensible. The omission of shadow, while it hinders the pictorial treatment of much that is attractive to European eyes, and limits the artist to beautiful form and beautiful colour, has at least one advantage. It absolutely precludes the pretentious realism that would make a picture a kind of sham nature, a deceptive imitation of natural objects that is far commoner among us than we are apt to imagine. In the absence of shadow, a picture can never seem to be anything but the flat expanse of pigment that it actually is, and so keeps its place as a part of the wall surface.

  It would be a mistake to suppose that Japanese art attained this harmony with its surroundings all at once. In its origin it is wholly derivative, since, for centuries, the island painters did nothing that was not an imitation of the much earlier work of the Chinese and Coreans. Thus to view their achievement in true perspective, we must first examine that of the mainland.

  Were we to trust tradition, we should have to believe that art was flourishing in China and Corea long before the Christian era. No paintings, however, are said to survive that are older than the eighth century A.D., the period of the great Wu Taotsz, whose fame is perpetuated by a few works of doubtful authenticity and many fantastic legends. That relating to his end is a fair specimen of them. It is said that he was commissioned ‘by the Emperor to decorate a room in the palace at Pekin. Concealing himself and his work by curtains, Wu Taotsz laboured in solitude for many months. At last the Emperor was summoned to view the completed painting: the curtains were drawn aside, and he was shown a picture of a palace, with splendid gardens behind it. Filled with admiration, he expressed his regret that he could never possess the reality. Wu Taotsz answered by walking up to a door in the foreground of the picture, which he opened, and, turning, invited the Emperor to follow him. As the artist spoke from within the doorway the door suddenly closed upon him, and immediately the whole painting vanished, leaving the Emperor face to face with a blank wall.

  Wu Taotsz was followed by generation after generation of excellent painters, and it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that the artistic genius of the Chinese began to show signs of exhaustion, while a hundred years later vigour and originality survived only in the porcelain factories. The art of the Corean peninsula either started earlier than that of the mainland, or developed more rapidly. Whatever the period of its growth its excellence was short-lived, for by the time that Japan was turning its attention to pictures, Corea
had ceased to possess a living art, and was content to export the productions of China.

  To those unacquainted with the history of Mongol civilisation the sight of even the few specimens of Chinese and Corean painting in the British Museum will come as a revelation, combining as they do an extraordinary vigour and naturalness, with a breadth of mass, a delicacy of handling, and a mastery of cool colour, that remind one of Andrea del Castagno or Paolo Uccello. Only in the period of decline do we come across jagged outlines and crowded contortion; the early work is as severe and simple as was the Memphite art of Egypt.

  When China was prosperous and civilised, and while Corean art was reaching its climax, the Japanese were still barbarians. This composite race — a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Corean elements — displaced the previous settlers, the hairy Ainu, some time before the Christian era. Under the influence of the arts and sciences that reached them from the mainland by-way of Corea, they emerged slowly from a savage condition and began to develop a marked taste for industrial and pictorial design. Not to go into historical detail, it will be sufficient to say that as far as painting is concerned, three separate traditions may be traced in Japanese work. Two of these are of considerable antiquity, but are almost entirely borrowed from the art of the continent; while the third is perhaps more nearly a national product, and, with ail its failings, had at least the merit of tolerance, a merit which enabled it to father the great art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  The first painting that came to Japan seems to have been the hieratic art of the Buddhist priests, splendid in colour and majestic in sentiment, but so conservative that it has lasted to our own time with comparatively little change. Its practitioners were chiefly skilful copyists who had only a moderate influence on the work of their contemporaries in the other fields of practical art.

  Chinese secular art did not become fashionable till a much later period, though the paintings of the mainland must have been imported from the earliest times. The tradition produced no really individual masters before the fifteenth century, when the germ of the school afterwards known as Kano took root. The painters of the Kano school, like their Chinese predecessors, worked most frequently in black and white, aiming at a semi-naturalistic treatment of landscapes, animals, and figures modified by the capabilities of the decisive brush stroke used for writing Chinese characters. Though the progress of the school was hindered by too strict adherence to traditional methods and subjects, the freshness and vigour of its great masters are the real backbone of the finest period of Japanese art. No influence is more prominent in the work of Hokusai’s maturity than that of the square forcible handling of the Kano painters, indeed their great humorist Itcho seems actually to anticipate the modern master in his lighter vein.