![]() ![]() It could easily be detected that the range of the painter’s fancy was limited by a logical canon that he forbade himself to transfer to his canvas any scene too extensive to be revealed by a single glance of the eye that, in short, just as Japanese poetry never rose to the dignity of an ode but stopped short at a couplet, so Japanese pictures, instead of telling a complete story, merely suggested an incident. They found something slight, something trivial, in Japanese pictures a lack of emotion-inspiring motive an absence of massiveness and breadth of treatment. People were unwilling to admit that a new star of the first magnitude had really risen on the horizon. But what, after all, was Japanese art? Must it be regarded as simply decorative, or might it also be considered representative? That question pressed importunately for an answer. He could not hide from himself that the revival of decorative art in Europe had been stimulated and guided by the study of first-class Japanese work, and that types of the highest æsthetic quality were to In the field of art, however, his estimate of her capacities was different. He watched the result much as he would have watched the experiments of a horticulturist seeking to make peonies blow on a briar stem. A sentiment of curiosity, perhaps academical, perhaps ethnographical, but certainly languid, was awakened in his breast by the intelligence that an Oriental nation had undertaken not merely to discard its Oriental garments, but also to prove that they had always been a misfit. Up to the eve of that war, the average European or American bestowed upon her no more attention than he accorded to some new phenomenon in the world of physics. showed the world that she was something more than a kind of pretty toy country, where the trivial tourist might enjoy the sight of people using paper pocket-handkerchiefs, feeding themselves with two sticks instead of a knife and fork, and living in houses without windows and where the dilettante might find art treasures as charming as they were novel. ![]() ![]() Apan’s victorious war with the neighbouring Empire in 1894–5Ī Geisha (from line drawing by Hokusai). ![]()
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