upon the border, _degradation rosée_” (fading into Beni, that mystic
tint, the spirit of ashes of rose), “birds are swooping,—violet
dresses, across which woven in light, zigzag insect characters,
composing the Japanese alphabet,—violet dresses, where Corean lions,
grim and ferocious, crouch, gleaming in shading of old bronze within
the purple folds! Dresses of mauve, smoky, shading into bistre, where
the purple iris unsheathes its head from the slender gray-green stalk!”
Mourasiki-ya (maison mauve) was the name of the atelier of Utamaro.
“Robes of that milky blue the Chinese call ‘blue of the sky after the
rain,’ beneath clusters of pale rose peonies; dresses of silvery gray,
fretted with sprays of flowering shrubs, making a misty moonshine;
pea-green dresses, enamelled with rosy cherry blooms; green dresses,
fading into watery tints, hidden by groups of the pawlonia, the coat
of arms of the reigning family; purple costumes, channelled with water
courses, where mandarin ducks pursue each other around the hem. Oh,
the beautiful black backgrounds, controlling the scintillating mass
of colour! Black robes sown with chrysanthemums, or showered with
pine-needles, worked in white. Black dresses, where finely woven
baskets are mingled with sceptres of office! ‘Oh! les belles robes!’ he
cries, where flights of cranes dissolve into the distance, where birds
are fluttering, where lacy fretwork of fans and little garlands are
interwoven!—a motive delighted in by Utamaro as a framework for beloved
faces.” All that is beautiful in nature and art lived and breathed in
these dresses, upon which the loving hand of the painter left a grace
in every fold.
The early inspirer of Utamaro’s genius was Kiyonaga, who had restored
the glory of the school of Torii—the printer’s branch of Ukiyo-ye,
which had sunk into temporary oblivion under the waning powers of
Kiyomitsu. The atelier of Kiyonaga became the sanctuary of the artists
of Ukiyo-ye, who, upon entering, forsook their individual traditions.
There worshipped Toyokuni of Utagawa; Yeishi, the scion of classic and
aristocratic Kano; and at the master’s feet sat the Young Utamaro,
absorbing his methods until, in his early compositions, said M. de
Goncourt, the technique and mannerisms of Kiyonaga “saute aux yeux.”
The influence of Kiyonaga pervades his most beautiful work; but later,
under a life of constant self-indulgence, amongst associations all
tending to demoralization, his genius suffered an eclipse. His loss
of self-control affected his art, until the sweeping lines and noble
contours which his brush had acquired in the atelier of Kiyonaga were
lost or widely travestied into a “delirium of female tallness.” In
these wild flights his brother artists followed in headlong pursuit,
and the contagion of the movement swept the studios of Paris. In the
modern poster we see the degenerate offspring of the genius of Utamaro,
and of Toyokuni. Professor Fenollosa said, “The generation of Aubrey
Beardsley prefer these tricks to the sober grace of Harunobu, Kiyonaga
and Koriusai.” It is art born of excess, a “Zolaism in prints.”
The horrors of diseased imagination, the visions begotten of absinthe,
which blot the brilliant pages of De Maupassant and the verse of Paul
Verlaine, were reflected by Utamaro in his studies of the loathsome
and the abnormal, where Montaigne declares, “L’esprit faisant le
cheval eschappé, enfante des chimères.” The blasphemous impieties of
this culte, deplored by all true Frenchmen, in the country of Hugo and
Molière, were distanced by Utamaro, who suborned his art, his cynical
brush caricaturing under the distorted figures of noted courtesans
the saints and sages of the sacred Buddhist legends. Trading upon his
vast popularity, he issued a pictorial satire upon one of the famous
Shoguns, but this act of lèse-majesté brought him into disfavour with
the reigning Shogun, the Louis XV of Japan, an artistic voluptuary,
like his prototype, the subject of Utamaro’s cartoon, and the artist
was condemned and cast into prison. From his cell the gay butterfly of
the Yoshiwara emerged, spent and enfeebled, daring no more flights of
fancy, and dying in 1806, before he reached his fiftieth year, from the
effects of his confinement and the misuse of pleasure.
Oh, the pity of it! the profound pathos in the picture, in Sekiyen’s
preface of the little “Outa” holding his treasured prize, “la petite
bestiole,”—the childish artist-hands of the embryo master clasping the
insect so gently to preserve its ephemeral life, yet later plunging
into the dissipation and excesses which shortened his own. Living with
the déclassé, however we may gloss their imperfections and cover with
the cloak of charity their sorrowful calling, he became himself a
cynic, an outcast, an iconoclast, learning that “hardening of the heart
which brings
“Irreverence for the dreams of youth.”
Though Utamaro was one of the greatest of the popular artists, his
demoralization led to the decadence of his school, which later was
regenerated by the great master of Ukiyo-ye, Hokusai, the artist of
the people. In Hokusai, “Dreaming the things of Heaven and of Buddha,”
breathed the pure spirit of art,—that Spirit of poetry and purity which
calls to us in Milton’s immortal lines:
“Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free.
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.”
The Romance of Hokusai.
Master of Ukiyo-ye.
“_From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the forms of things.
By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but
all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking
into account. At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real
structure of nature,—of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and
insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still
more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at
a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage, and when
I am a hundred and ten, everything I do—be it but a line or dot—will
be alive. I beg those who live as long as I, to see if I do not keep
my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me,—once Hokusai,—today
Gwakio-rojin, ‘the old man, mad about drawing.’_”
“_Ars longa, vita brevis_,” though a time-worn aphorism, seems
the best comment upon these words of Hokusai, which preface the
“Fugaku Hiak’kei” (Hundred Views of Fuji). Judging from what he had
accomplished, before his death in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, and
the continual increase in his powers, it is easy to believe that had
his life been extended to the limit he craved, the prophecy would have
been fulfilled.
M. Louis Gonse says of Hokusai, “He is the last and most brilliant
figure of a progress of more than ten centuries—the exuberant and
exquisite product of a time of profound peace and incomparable
refinement.”
From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the
supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career
he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being
exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier
of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly
absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was
trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic
fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art.
He drank at the fountain-head of China, then absorbed the traditions of
the “two great streams of Kano and Tosa, which flowed without mixing
to the middle of the eighteenth century.” Kano, springing from Chinese
models, was transformed by the genius of Masanobu and his followers,
and became the most illustrious school of painting in Japan. It was the
official school of the Shoguns, in opposition to “Tosa”—that elegant
and exquisite appanage of the Mikados, which represented aristocratic
taste.
The Tosa school is characterized by extreme delicacy of execution
and fine use of the brush, as in Persian miniature painting. The
splendour of the screens of Tosa has never been surpassed, with their
precious harmonies in colour and delicate designs (so often imitated in
lacquer), against glorious backgrounds in rich gold-leaf.
He studied the technique of Okio, founder of the school of realism,
which, maturing at Kyoto, led up to “Ukiyo-ye,” the popular art of the
masses of Yedo. Ukiyo-ye, literally “The Floating World,” despised by
the ascetic disciples of Buddha and Confucius for picturing the gay
world of fashion and folly, was the name of the school which liberated
Japanese art from the shackles of centuries of tradition.
[Illustration: Two Ladies. By Hokusai.]
Ukiyo-ye is the supreme expression, the concentrated essence of
the schools, a river of art whose fount was India, Persia and China.
For centuries it was forced into narrow channels by the haughty and
exclusive aristocracy; but ever widening, its branches at last united
and swept into their joyous current the common people of Japan, who,
intuitively art lovers, had ever thirsted for the living stream. Now
they beheld themselves reflected, in all the naturalness of daily life,
yet with a spiritual rendering, “appealing,” said Jarves, “to those
intuitions with which the soul is freighted when it first comes to
earth, whose force is ever manifested by a longing for an ideal not of
the earth, and whose presence can only be explained as an augury of
a superior life to be, or else the dim reminiscence of one gone; and
the recognition of this ideal is the touchstone of art—art which then
becomes the solution of immortality.”
The originators of Ukiyo-ye, which included in its scope painting
proper, book illustration and single-sheet pictorial prints, were
Iwasa Matahei and Moronobu, followed in long succession by Shunsui,
the precursor of Hokusai’s master, Shunsho; and united with it were
the engravers of the Torii school, culminating in Kiyonaga (with whose
grace and beauty of line Hokusai could never compete), the refined
offshoot of the Kitao, and the elegant scion of Kano—Yeishi.
Hokusai’s individuality and independence long galled his master, and
a final rupture was caused by the pupil’s enthusiasm for the bold and
sweeping, black-and-white, calligraphic strokes of Kano. Then began
a hard struggle for the youthful artist, who had no money and no
influence. His father was a maker of metal mirrors, Hokusai’s real
name being Nakajima Tetsu Jiro, but his pseudonyms were legion. In
the atelier of Shunsho, he was called Shunro,—taking with the other
disciples of this school of Katsukawa, the first syllable of his
master’s name.
Cast adrift upon the streets of Yedo, he sold red pepper, and hawked
almanacs, at the same time constantly studying, and seizing the best
ideas from all the schools. Blent with an intuitive instinct for art,
the Japanese nature is essentially histrionic, and throughout the whole
career of Hokusai there is an element which is genuinely dramatic.
C. J. Holmes, in his beautiful work on Hokusai, gives many romantic
incidents in the artist’s life, and was it not by a theatrical _tour de
force_ that he first won popular favour?
He chose no doubt a national holiday, perhaps the festival of “Cherry
Viewing,” when Uyeno Park is thronged with sightseers of every station
in life. Here in the heart of the great city of Tokyo is a hallowed
spot—majestic, grand and peaceful, where in mystic solemnity the sacred
cedars enshrine that wondrous necropolis of illustrious dead,—for at
Uyeno lie buried six of the famous Shoguns.
In the courtyard of one of the temples, Hokusai erected a rough
scaffolding, upon which was spread a sheet of paper, eighteen yards
long and eleven in width. Here in the sacred heart of Japan, with
tubs of water and tubs of ink, the master and predestined genius of
his country manifested his power. He swept his huge brush this way
and that, the crowd constantly increasing in density, many scaling
the temple roof to see the marvellous feat,—a colossal figure,
springing into life at the touch of the creator. All who know his work
can in imagination picture the grand sweeping curves and graduated
shadings that the magic broom evolved; and the artistic people gazed
spell-bound, while many a murmured “Naruhodo!” (Wonderful) and sibilant
inhalation of the breath marked their recognition of the master’s power.
Displaying less of the artist than the genius at legerdemain were
Hokusai’s street tricks—almost reprehensible did we not know the dire
straits to which genius is often reduced. An eager expectant crowd
dogged his footsteps and watched with delighted curiosity, while he
sketched landscapes, upside down, with an egg or a bottle, or a wine
measure, anything that came to his hand,—changing with bewildering
effect from huge figures of Chinese heroes and demigods to microscopic
drawings on grains of rice, and pictures made out of chance blots of
ink.
His fame was noised abroad, and at last reached the ears of the Shogun,
and now an unprecedented honour was conferred upon the humble apostle
of the artisan, for he was summoned before the august presence to
give an exhibition of his skill. The Japanese are ever imitative, and
Hokusai may have borne in mind the legend of his prototype Sesshiu, an
artist-priest of the fifteenth century, who sketched before the Emperor
of China a marvellous dragon, with splashes from a broom plunged in ink.
Still more spectacular and theatrical was Hokusai’s debut, for,
spreading a sheet of paper before the feet of the monarch, he covered
it with a blue wash,—then seizing a live cock, he daubed its feet with
a red pigment, and let it run over the wet colour, when the Shogun
and his astonished courtiers beheld a flowing stream of liquid blue,
upon which appeared to float filmy segregated petals of red maple
leaves. A mere trick!—unworthy of genius, we might say, but Hokusai had
gauged his countrymen, and knew that his _jeu d’esprit_ would arouse
and impress these aristocratic connoisseurs, jaded with ceremonial
observances, more than any display of technical knowledge,—for the
Japanese, as a nation, are naively childish in their love of novelty
and amusement, and of the unusual and bizarre.
Is it not possible that this trickery of the master may have
unconsciously supplied the motive for Hiroshige’s famous print of a
Yedo suburb, chosen by Professor Fenollosa, in his beautiful work on
Ukiyo-ye,—where he so poetically says, “the orange fire of maples
deepens the blue of marshy pools”?
Space does not permit any detailed description of the compositions
of Hokusai, and there is no complete catalogue of his works, the
one nearest to accuracy being M. Edmond de Goncourt’s _Catalogue
raisonné_. His fecundity was marvellous. He illustrated books of all
kinds, poetry, comic albums, accounts of travels,—in fact his works
are an encyclopedia of Japanese life. His paintings are scattered, and
countless numbers lost, many being merely ephemeral drawings, thrown
off for the passing pleasure of the populace. The original designs
for the prints were transferred to the blocks, and lost, though the
master rigidly superintended the reproduction of his works, and his
wood-cutters were trained to follow the graceful sweeping curves with
perfect accuracy, many of his compositions being ruled across for exact
reduction.
[Illustration: A River Scene. By Hok’kei, the faithful pupil of
Hokusai, who strove to follow in the footsteps of the Master.]
Ukiyo-ye art is bound up with print development, and the climax of
xylography had been reached in the time of Hokusai. Japanese book
illustration, and single-sheet printing, revolutionized the world’s
art. The great connoisseurs of colour tell us that nowhere else is
there anything like it,—so rich and so full, that a print comes to have
every quality of a complete painting.
Hokusai had served a four years’ apprenticeship to the school of
engraving, and his practiced eye was ever ready to detect any
inaccuracy in his workmen. “I warn the engraver,” he said, “not to add
an eyeball underneath when I do not draw one. As to the nose, these two
are mine,”—here he draws a nose in front and in profile,—“I will not
have the nose of Utagawa.” The greatest difference exists in the beauty
and colouring of the impressions, and the amateur, in his search for
Ukiyo-ye gems, should not trust his unaided judgment.
M. Louis Gonse said of the surimono, “To me they are the most seductive
morsels of Japanese art.” They are small, oblong prints, composed as
programmes for festive occasions with a text of verse enriched by
exquisite illustration. The surimono of Hokusai showed the influence of
Tosa, the decoration being very elaborate, and delicate as a Persian
miniature. In places, the surface of the print is goffered for ornament
in relief, and the colouring is enforced by inlaying in gold, silver,
bronze and tin.
Some of the best examples of Hokusai’s art are the “Waterfalls,” the
“Bridges,” “Thirty-six Views of Fuji,” the “Gwafu,” the “Hundred
Views of Fuji” (of which the finest edition was brought out in London
with a commentary by Mr. F. V. Dickins), and the fifteen volumes of
the “Mang-wa,”—a term hardly translatable, but signifying fugitive
sketches, or drawing as it comes, spontaneously. The preface best gives
us the intention of the master.
“Under the roof of Boksenn, in Nagoya, he dreamed and drew some three
hundred compositions. The things of Heaven and of Buddha, the life of
men and women, even birds and beasts, plants and trees, he has included
them all, and under his brush every phase and form of existence has
arisen. The master has tried to give life to everything he has painted,
and the joy and happiness so faithfully expressed in his work are a
plain proof of his victory.”
Hokusai has been called the king of the artisans, and it was for them
especially that he composed the drawings of Mang-wa. His influence is
expressed in all their works: in the structure of the roofs of temples,
in houses and their interiors; upon the things of every-day life, as
upon flowers and landscapes, upon lacquer, inros and netsukis, bronzes
and ivory.
Gustave Geffroy truly gauged the genius of Hokusai in speaking of his
“flights beyond the horizon.” In the master we recognize the creator.
He feels the mystery of the birth of mountains, as in that weird
composition of Fuji, where the great cone is seen rising above circle
upon circle of serpentine coils, forming the mystic tomoyé—symbol of
creation and eternity. He feels the pulsation of the universe, and the
life of ocean, and in a frenzy of creative power, beneath his hand
the curved crests of foaming waves break into life, flashing into
countless sea-birds born of the froth of ocean. He is the painter of
chimera, the prophet of cataclysm; he “gives the world a shake and
invents chaos.” How vivid is Holmes’ description of the wave in the
seventh Mang-wa!
“Man becomes a mere insect, crouching in his frail catamaran, as the
giant billow topples and shakes far above him. The convention of black
lines with which he represents falling rain is as effectual 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 tree before it; how
the gusts blow the people hither and thither, how sheets of drenching
rain half veil a landscape, how the great white cone of his beloved
Fuji gleams through a steady downpour! His lightning 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 ‘Fugaku Hiak’kei,’ 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!”
Poetry and art are ever allied, and the vibrations of genius encircle
the globe. Byron and Ruskin and Hokusai were contemporaries. Possibly
at the very moment when the poet was immortalizing himself by composing
his “Storm in the Alps,” the grand “old man, mad about drawing,” was
sketching the peerless mountain:—
“Far along
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the loud thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.”
Lord Byron’s vivid pen also best describes the squally storms of both
Hiroshige and Hokusai,—where
“The big rain comes dancing to the earth.”
Was not Hokusai truly “a portion of the tempest”? as he represents
himself, drawing Fuji, in winter, working in a frenzy of haste,—for
the ground is covered with snow—two brushes in his hand, and wonder
of wonders! one held between his toes. This picture, also from “The
Hundred Views of Fuji,” prefaces Marcus B. Huish’s work on Japanese art.
The closing scene in the drama of Hokusai’s life is full of pathos.
Though his whole career had been shadowed by poverty, and shrouded in
obscurity, his art still held him earth-bound. Upon his death-bed he
said, “If Heaven would only grant me ten more years!”
Then, as he realized that the end approached, he murmured, “If Heaven
had but granted me five more years I could have been a real painter.”
So ended the life of the master of Ukiyo-ye. His body lies beneath
the pines of Asakusa, but would we not gladly believe that his “soul
turned Will-o’-the-wisp, may ever come and go at ease, over the summer
fields,”—for this was the last expression of his passionate desire.
Hiroshige.
Landscape Painter and Apostle of Impressionism.
If the lovely “Land of the Rising Sun” should, during one of those
volcanic throes which threaten her extinction, sink forever beneath the
depths of ocean, she would yet live for us through the magic brush of
Hiroshige. Gazing at his landscapes, the airy wing of imagination wafts
us to a land of showers and sunsets—a fairy scene, where the rainbow
falls to earth, shattered into a thousand prisms—where waters softly
flow towards horizons touched with daffodil or azure tinted.
Here is a gliding _sampan_ with closed shutters. Inside, the lantern’s
diffused light throws a silhouette upon the bamboo curtain, a drooping
girlish head bending towards the unseen lover at her feet. Ripples play
upon the water, stirred by the amorous breath of oriental night. In
fancy we hear the tinkling of the samisen, touched by delicate fingers,
sweetly perfumed.
Now we see rain upon the Tokaido. A skurrying storm. Affrighted coolies
running this way and that. A mountain full of echoes and horror. Down
it splash rivulets, running into inky pools. Darkness and terror and
loneliness, and longing for warmth and shelter and the peace of home.
In marked contrast is one of the “Seven Impressions of Hakone.” A glad
reveille. The sun breaks out, the clouds have burst asunder, masses of
vapour float here and there. All is chaotic, untamed, a palette wildly
mingled.
The Japanese so dearly love Nature, in all her moods, that when she
dons her mantle of snow they hesitate, even when necessity compels,
to sully its purity. In one of Utamaro’s prints, sweetly entitled by
M. Edmond de Goncourt “La Nature Argentée,” a little musüme is seen
searching the snowy landscape she loves, and, hating to blot the
beautiful carpet, she cries, “Oh, the beautiful new snow! Where shall
I throw the tea-leaves?” With Hiroshige, the artist of snow and mist,
we feel this love, and so successfully, does he deal with a snowy
landscape that we see the snow in masses, luminous, soft and unsullied,
as if Nature had lent a helping hand to portray her pure white magic.
So, without formula or technique, but absolutely and sincerely, he
unrolls the winter pageant before us.