The purpose of art is no other than to delineate the form and express
the spirit of an object, animate or inanimate, as the case may be. The
use of art is to produce copies of things; and if an artist has a
thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints he can
assuredly make a name. Just as a writer of profound erudition and good
memory has ever at his command an inexhaustible supply of words and
phrases which he freely makes use of in writing, so can a painter, who
has accumulated experience by drawing from nature, paint any object
without a conscious effort. The artist who confines himself to copying
from models painted by his master, fares no better than a literatus who
cannot rise above transcribing others' compositions. An ancient critic
says that writing ends in describing a thing or narrating an event, but
painting can represent the actual forms of things. Without the true
depiction of objects, there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of
sentiment and such-like only come after a successful delineation of the
external form of an object. The beginner in art should direct his
efforts more to the latter than to the former. He should learn to paint
according to his own ideas, not to slavishly copy the models of old
artists. Plagiarism is a crime to be avoided not only by men of letters
but also by painters.
_Okio_ (Japanese, eighteenth century).