. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. m8£f Snowy Egret. 246 Nine Years in Nipon. book are often both wrong andunartlstic, while those ofPettigrew are stiffly correct but ungraceful. On a foldingscreen which I had there was a great flock of cranes inflight, descending and in every conceivable attitude. Theeye was closely carried down the canvas—shall I say?—till you felt the whirling flight make you almost giddy,—a genuine triumph of art. Here is a specimen which seems to me also to be trueto nature and full of grace and suggestive hints of the. Wild Goose descending nat
. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. m8£f Snowy Egret. 246 Nine Years in Nipon. book are often both wrong andunartlstic, while those ofPettigrew are stiffly correct but ungraceful. On a foldingscreen which I had there was a great flock of cranes inflight, descending and in every conceivable attitude. Theeye was closely carried down the canvas—shall I say?—till you felt the whirling flight make you almost giddy,—a genuine triumph of art. Here is a specimen which seems to me also to be trueto nature and full of grace and suggestive hints of the. Wild Goose descending natural environment of the subject, conveyed with ex-quisitely simple sincerity. Even in wood-work natural forms are most skilfullyrendered subservient to the purposes of ornament, whilenatures blunders are triumphantly made to yield an ele-ment of new beauty. I have seen a screen made of canearranged as a spiders web. Now, I can imagine how askilled British workman would grasp the conception andat once give us in cane a severe problem in Euclid. TheJapanese artist does nothing of the sort. He looks at na-ture again and again, but he does not allow ideal forms Japanese Art in Relation to Nature. 247 to dissipate its truth. This web of cane, then, was notrigidly geometrical, but as if broken and in process of re-paration by a spider (in bronze) placed near, but, of course,not quite in the centre. There was nothing in the leastoffensive in the design. The twin aims, beauty and utility,were thoroughly harmonized without any sacrifice to thetruth of nature, and the v
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