Masters of Art - Katsushika Hokusai

by Katsushika Hokusai

  HOKUSAI — THE PAINTER OF LANDSCAPE

  MENTION has already been made of the geological peculiarities of Japan. The long train of islands extending nearly from the coast of Siberia to the Tropics, contains within itself almost every variety of scenery and climate, which to a certain extent is focussed, together with history, civilisation, and commerce, in the island of Nippon. Like England, this island is washed by an ocean current, and has, in consequence, a similar climate, only rather warmer and damper. Partly owing to its volcanic nature, partly owing to the fact that the whole string of islands is merely the summit of an enormous ridge, that plunges abruptly on the east into one of the deepest depressions of the Pacific, the country as a whole is mountainous, though, with the exception of Fuji and one or two others, the mountains are of no very considerable height. It is well watered by numerous rocky rivers, whose tree-clad gorges remind one of Scotland, just as certain of the seaside places at the extremity of the alluvial plains are, in the distance, not unlike some of our own watering-places. Variety of elevation and a temperate climate combine to encourage a flora of the most varied kind. The flat country, by the rivers, generally devoted to the cultivation of rice, grows plants, the bamboo for instance, that are semi-tropical or tropical; the hills are covered with pine-trees, while the gardens and roadsides are gay with cherry and plum-trees, or shadowed by cedars. The great avenues of the latter tree which line many of the now almost deserted highways are, perhaps, a more impressive reminder of bygone state than even the temples with their wonderful carvings and gay red lacquer that contrast so well with the dark foliage. The variations of the climate, the ever present mist that in warm weather allows the distance to be visible only for a short time in the early morning, coupled with this diversity of scenery, make the country an ideal one for the landscape painter who can do no more than copy the scene before him.

  Beautiful as the country is, the beauty shown in the work of its landscape artists is a different thing from the reality. Even Hiroshige, the greatest realist of them all, who draws his Fuji with the spreading cone that one sees in a photograph, in his search for the picturesque exaggerates the slopes of minor eminences, makes rocks more rugged, trees more vast, grass more green, and seas more blue. Hokusai was born some fifty years earlier, and had no forerunners but the landscapists of the Kano and Chinese schools, whose toppling precipices, jagged crags, spiky trees, and intrusive expanses of flat cloud are endlessly iterated, alike in precious kakemono and cheap popular guidebooks. Hence it is that his early landscapes, like his early figure designs, are so coloured by tradition that to the casual eye his peculiar genius is absent. The first set of Yedo views, as we have seen, is only separated from preceding guide-books by an occasional outburst of naturalism — the river with an expanse of snow-clad fields beyond it under a dark winter sky, or the bridge with its crowd of hurrying figures. It is not until Hokusai appears in the Mangwa as a mature and individual artist that his landscape is really an important thing.

  Even here a certain amount of progress may be traced. The first volume contains only scraps — separate sketches of varieties of trees, houses, or waterfalls; the second, about half a dozen small and simple compositions, with a double page study of the sea (Pl. III.) — the crawling foam that creeps over the sand fold upon fold, and, below, the dark hollow of a great wave just about to break. Their juxtaposition is so ingeniously contrived that the extent, the flatness, and the complex folds of the foam enhance by contrast the massive sweep of the billow beneath. On the following pages two studies of river eddies show that the formulæ which Hokusai employed with such signal success in the Waterfalls were already in process of evolution. In the third Mangwa the few landscapes, except for another great wave, are full of Chinese convention, and show no marked advance, though a drawing of a house, made to look rather foolish by an incorrect application of the rules of perspective, shows that he was not wholly ignorant of that science. The fourth volume is again a volume of scraps; but in the fifth, after a series of careful studies of architecture, we come across a really noble landscape. Beyond an expanse of sea stretches a beach backed by a pine forest from which a wreath of white mist is driving away to the dark hills behind, and above all rise the sweeping lines of a huge snow-clad cone. Alike in accuracy of insight and quiet perfection of design the plate is in marked contrast to the other landscape in the volume, where the sea, unpleasantly frothed and twisted, drives an absurdly small boat against a tortured crag. In the seventh Mangwa, however, the majesty of nature is honoured more adequately (Pl. IV.). The great prints of mountains in winter rising out of the clouds over fantastic bridges, beyond the gentle lines of lesser elevations, or sweeping down into unknown space, are evidence of the labours which culminated in the landscapes of the Gwafu and the two sets of views of Fuji.

  Our western feeling for landscape has always been rather for what is cheerful and pleasant. We admit the pensive poetry of Gainsborough or Corot, but do not at heart admire, as we ought to admire, the grander horizons of which Titian and Rembrandt give us an occasional glimpse. We fail to appreciate, except in a commercial sense, the mightiness of Turner’s early maturity, the grave accomplishment of Crome, the magnificence of the Lucas mezzotints after Constable, the solemnity of Wilson, Girtin, and Cozens. These latter are of course technically imperfect, yet, the imperfection once granted, they were masters of a grandeur and simplicity which their successors never equalled. The fashionable painters of our own time are content with what is sufficiently pretty and sufficiently near to the public notion of the spots and sparkles of nature to be readily saleable. Even those whose views are more serious, whose sympathies are more profound, are content with the foreground material of the wayside. A few trees nobly arranged, a heroic barn set against a misty twilight satisfy their highest ambitions.

  With Hokusai it was otherwise. As his figure - drawing embraces the whole living world known to him, so his conception of landscape includes every phase of the scenery of Japan, from the garden with its toy crags to the immensity of mountain, ocean, and wilderness. Nor does he view them only with the tranquil insight that makes his human world so gay and humorous. He is the only artist who has ever realised the majesty of winter. The grey sky of Hiroshige is bitterly cold, but his snow almost always suggests a thaw; he has a preference for the Merry Christmas side of winter weather. Hokusai knows the iron intensity of frost, as he shows by the moonlight scene among the crags in the Gwafu, and the terrible desolation of country buried under snowdrifts, emphasised at one time by a suggestion of utter remoteness from humanity, as in the double-peaked mountain of the seventh Mangwa, at another, by the introduction of man, become impotent in the face of the vast impassive nature around him, as in the scene from the Hundred Views (vol. iii.), where a procession with banners and trumpets passes under the great silent cone, or the print from the ninth Mangwa, where the straggling files of a great army wind, like ants, among snow-clad hills (Pl. V.).

  Yet, while he sees that the repose of nature may be terrible (Pl. XV.), Hokusai does not forget that her motion is terrible also. We have spoken of the great wave of the second Mangwa (Pl. III.). With it should be compared the celebrated coloured print from the Thirty-six Views of Fuji, generally known as The Wave (Pl. XII.). Here once more man becomes a mere insect crouching in his frail catamaran as the giant billow topples and shakes far above him. An adherence to Chinese convention often makes Hokusai’s drawing of breakers look fantastic, but they never fail of being furious — as furious as are his storms. The convention of black lines with which he represents falling rain is as effective as his conventions for water are fanciful. The storm of Rembrandt, of Rubens, or of Turner is often terrible, but never really wet; Constable gets the effect of wetness, but his storms are not terrible. Hokusai knows how a gale lashes water into foam, and bows the trees before it (Pl. IV.); how the gusts blow people hither and thither (Pl. XVI.); how sheets of driving, drenching rain half veil a landscape, and how the great white cone of his beloved Fu
ji gleams through a steady downpour. Clouds alone elude his simple formulae. One or two prints in the Mangwa show that he made desperate efforts to master the cumulus, but the efforts were unsuccessful. The level bars of stratus he manages more easily, indeed they are part of the heritage left him by his Chinese predecessors; and even in such a late series as the Hundred Poems he does not disdain to draw their thin flakes across figures and buildings in the foreground when it suits him. His lightning, too, is rather odd in comparison with the realistic studies of the great artists of Europe; but what European ever tried an effect so stupendous as that recorded in Plate XI, where the snowy top of Fuji is seen at evening, crimson with the last fiery rays of sunset, while all the flanks of the mountain are hidden by a dark storm-cloud, through which the lightning flashes. The colours, the tones, the forms, are not perhaps those of nature, but the print is certainly magnificent, and it has yet to be proved that the thing could be done better in any other way.

  Hokusai’s feeling for rivers is like his feeling for mountains. He knows them well from source to sea, but has an instinctive preference for their grander aspects, the wide expanse of a reedy estuary, the massive current of the lower reaches that swings the ferry-boat this way and that, the long pools above where the stream moves gently under pine-woods, its surface dimmed by a veil of mist, and, still more, the rapids where the water whirls down among rocks and fantastic tree-trunks. Best of all, he loves the waterfall, whether it take the form of a long veil of foam sliding over the edge of a mossy precipice into some deep chasm (Pl. X.), or the downward rush of a bulkier torrent like that in which the red horse (a memory of the legend of Yoshitsune) is being washed (Pl. XIV.), or that in the plate in the thirteenth Mangwa, where a tiger savagely struggling is swept away into space — the terror of the plunge being suggested by the plain seen below under the arch of the falling water. No other painter has looked things in the face so frankly — has dared to express the stolid everlasting might of nature, against which scheming man and strong beast alike are powerless.

  Not that man’s work is wholly empty or feeble. Hokusai is not only a painter of landscape, but the painter of the life of his own country, and, as such, it is inevitable that he should deal with the landscape as modified by human effort; the structures under which men live or worship, by which they elude or overcome the opposition of nature. He knows every joint of the complicated wooden roof of the temples (Mangwa v.), as well as the simpler panels and frames of ordinary dwelling-houses, and uses their long simple lines to contrast with more broken and lively forms. He is especially fond of ships, from the clumsy square-built junk with its naked active sailors to the humble craft of the fisher-folk and the ferryman’s punt, whose motley crowd of passengers is always as delightful to him as was the idea of the river’s might eluded by man, that seems to have directed his tastes towards selecting the Bridges of Japan as a companion to his great series of The Waterfalls and the Thirty-six Views of Fuji. Apart from the opportunities of design afforded by the setting and spacing of formal architecture, he is in love with the air of dignity that these structures have when viewed from below, their great timbers rising high above the vast expanse of plain or mountain seen behind and beneath them. Even a rope bridge swinging across a chasm is made majestic by his hand, while the sacred mountain itself becomes a subordinate feature when it appears only under the water rushing from a conduit in the Hundred Views, struggles for supremacy with the timbers of a sluice in the Tokaido volume, or sinks into insignificance by the side of the gigantic beam that the sawyers are splitting in the print from the Thirty-six Views.

  So much for the general thoughts that seem to underlie Hokusai’s landscape work. The peculiarities of detail, the first thing that strike the novice, are really matters of small importance. His clouds, his trees, his rocks, his water, even his great mountains, are frankly conventional, and only in the two last does the convention seem quite adequate. His design often verges on the extravagant, and his topography on the impossible; nevertheless he has always the knack of giving that idea of reality, of life, which is the characteristic of his figure subjects. At first sight a composition strikes one as unnatural, but on looking into it, we find evidences everywhere of things actually seen — a row of birds pecking and chattering on a paling, odd funguses growing inside a hollow tree, a distance alive with little busy people. This exquisite insight is, indeed, characteristic of the artists of Japan. Harunobu, Koriusai, Shunsho, and Utamaro add to it extraordinary invention and delicacy of line and colour. Kiyonaga, less delicate and far less inventive than they, gained and retains popularity in virtue of his striving for realism. Hokusai stands in a place apart from them all, because he combined with this insight a majesty of design, a seriousness of purpose, and a comprehension of the true relation between man and nature, that even Western art has yet to parallel. That his true greatness has sometimes to be read between the lines of his work, is the result of nationality and circumstance, of technical limitations, for which proper allowance is not usually made. Space does not allow of their being discussed at great length, but the few notes given in the following chapter may at least serve to prevent misunderstanding.

  CHARACTERISTICS OF HOKUSAI’S WORK

  As the reader will have already surmised, by far the larger portion of Hokusai’s handiwork consists of brush drawings in black and white for engraving on wood. He left a great number of paintings, but these are for the most part so inferior to his engraved designs that they deserve no mention here. They were probably “pot-boilers,” painted to supply some pressing need, for they are frequently hasty in handling and fortuitous in arrangement.

  In considering the engraved designs, we have to realise, in the first place, the limitations under which they were produced. National tradition prohibited the introduction of shadow, but this prohibition would have had little weight with an independent spirit like that of Hokusai. His own words, already quoted, prove that he had seen how, by shadow, the Europeans produce a deceptive imitation of nature, but he adds that the Japanese artist is content with form and colour. That the most truly decorative painting of the West, from Giotto to Puvis de Chavannes, has in practice limited itself in a similar way is a warning against condemning Hokusai’s choice too hastily.

  We have again to remember that it was the national custom to draw with the brush instead of with the pen, which accounts for certain peculiarities of technique. Nevertheless, in Hokusai’s hands, the brush has none of the disabilities of the stiffer instrument; indeed, a drawing of a Chinese warrior in the writer’s possession is done with such extraordinary exactness and freedom, that even Dürer would have found it difficult to copy.

  Again, all Japanese drawing is done in black on a white ground. They thus miss the brilliant effects obtained by engravers, who design in white on black; and Hokusai is no exception to the rule. His design is blonde in general effect, and, except in fine early impressions, the darks are apt to look spotty, through over-printing, by contrast with the light portions. As has already been mentioned, the plates in the hero books suffer terribly in this respect.

  When due allowance has been made for these peculiarities, it at once becomes evident how magnificent a draughtsman Hokusai is. — H is hand is so steady that he can draw like a machine; his knowledge is so complete, that he can get straight to reality with the directness of a Rembrandt; his early work shows that he can imitate the feminine airs and graces of his predecessors; his later, that he had the secret of the vigour and force of the great Chinese masters. His skill is limited only by the shores of his native island, for, as we have seen, he drew most of its contents that were worth the drawing. He was master of the life and movements of the men and beasts around him, as no other artist has ever mastered the animate world of his own country. Besides drawing real things, he could design the unreal, and has created ghosts and monsters with a spirit and individuality that are quite unparalleled. He has the misfortune to be a humorist as well, so that his inimitable caricatures, his tend
ency to the attitude of the laughing philosopher, have given him, with the shallow and the ill-informed, the reputation of being merely the funny man of Japan. He draws the largest mass as magnificently as he draws the tiniest detail. His hand treats the great curves of wave or mountain, the sweeping folds of a dress, as accurately and easily as he draws the turn of an eye or a mouth, the gesture of a finger, or the engraving on a sword hilt.

  Yet, with all his natural gifts, he was too much devoted to his art to run the risk of failure through negligence. His whole history is a record of eager, unceasing study, and those who have looked over any considerable collection of his drawings will begin to realise that even a heaven-born genius does not achieve great success without great labour. In one collection alone, four large studies three or four times the size of the engraving exist for the print of the tiger jumping through a dust of leaves and pine needles in Mangwa xiii. The two here reproduced (Pls.VII. and VIII.) show how carefully Hokusai considered the form of the beast as well as his hide, and how he ruled his sketches across to ensure accurate reduction. When we remember that this volume appeared in the year of his death, and that the studies were therefore made when his powers were in their fullest maturity, we can form some slight idea of the incalculable amount of preparatory labour on which the vast engraved output of his life must have been based. That there is not a trace of this toil in his completed work is, perhaps, the most remarkable feature of Hokusai’s success.