. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. Conventional Carving of a BirdsHead, by an A ino fron Yesso. there may be many. On thewhole, the impression left onone is that Japanese art stri\esafter fidelity to nature, andsucceeds pretty well. Natureis complex, however, and technical skill is limited onmany sides and must grow by stages. Art struggles tofix one view of natures many-angled prism, and so it tendsto lose another. An object viewed artistically has form,size, colour, light, perspective, texture, motion, and wherelife is, expression. No one medium or method canoverta
. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. Conventional Carving of a BirdsHead, by an A ino fron Yesso. there may be many. On thewhole, the impression left onone is that Japanese art stri\esafter fidelity to nature, andsucceeds pretty well. Natureis complex, however, and technical skill is limited onmany sides and must grow by stages. Art struggles tofix one view of natures many-angled prism, and so it tendsto lose another. An object viewed artistically has form,size, colour, light, perspective, texture, motion, and wherelife is, expression. No one medium or method canovertake such a task as to fix and freeze all thosephases at once. And Japanese artists have neverattempted to do so, but in the directions in which theyhave seriously tried to advance, there have been fewignoble failures. The success in regard to inanimateobjects has been very signal and general, where geometricalperspective does not enter Ojitlines of Mo7i7it Fuji— I. From Miss Birds Unbeaten Tracks ; 2. From an old Japanese Drawing ; 3. From a Recent Photograph. In the above outlines we have (i) that of the view ofMount Fuji, presented to her readers by Miss Bird, inp. 13 of the first volume of her Unbeaten Tracks in Japan,with which, though in sight of Fuji almost daily for nine Japanese Art in Relation to Nature. 241 years, I have never seen anything in nature corresponding;(2) is from an old native drawing of Fuji, giving the usualconventional shape ; and (3) is from a photograph takenrecently. The two latter outlines correspond wonderfullywell, and the graceful logarithmic curve of such volcanicmountains is caught in the second one, though not quiteaccurately. It is often rendered much more correctly. The simplicity of the means whereby in wood-engraving acertain end is gained is very admirable. The sketch under-neath has perhaps not been quite successfully reproduced, but when printed onthe soft flabby paperof
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookidnineyearsinn, bookyear1888
