the origin of a tendency, but its outcome. It is in the direction of motives that this new departure can be traced most easily. The artist no longer sought his subjects in the field of sacred mythology, but turned rather to scenes of everyday life—court ceremonials, legendary lore, incidents in the biographies of celebrated men, episodes suggested by poetry, fiction or history, and so on. If we have to define the technical distinctions between these pictures and their predecessors of the Chinese School, the task becomes more difficult. Delicacy of stroke, more or less loss of firmness and strength, and the use of fuller-bodied colours, constitute, perhaps, the most palpable differences. This last feature—recourse to strong tints—became more and more marked as the school advanced in age, and ultimately a fashion arose of disposing the elements of a picture with a prime view to decorative effect, so that the coloured areas conveyed a suggestion of diapers or brocaded patterns. Such freaks, however, did not obtain vogue until the sixteenth century, and were confined almost entirely to what may be called the book illustrations of the time; namely, paintings on interminably long scrolls inscribed with historical or biographical records.[1] The Yamato artists are often said to have failed signally in their delineations of the human figure; to have followed traditional types, generally ungraceful and unnatural, and to have drawn faces, legs and arms that seldom approximated to correctness. That criticism must not be accepted too implicitly. It is certainly true when applied to the work done by the rank and file of the school; but in the case of the masters, close examination generally reveals that the outlines of their figures diverge, not from the standard of absolute correctness, but from the standard which we ourselves have been accustomed to regard as normal. They show us lines which assuredly exist in nature, but which are not the lines that Europeans and Americans have taught themselves to consider salient. We shall have occasion to refer again to this point.
The Yamato, or Japanese, School received the name of Tosa Riu (riu means style or school) in the middle of the thirteenth century, its principal representative (Tsunetaka) at that time having been honoured with the title of “Tosa Gon-no-Kami.” Thenceforth through every era down to our own day, the successive artists of the School bore the family name “Tosa.” The twelfth and thirteenth centuries represent the zenith of their achievements. A learned critic, Mr. E. F. Fenollosa, speaks of “a score of the greatest artists of Japan, who illuminated this period in constellated clusters, and made of it, perhaps, the most brilliant epoch of Japanese art.” He calls it “the culmination of the power and splendour of that school which comes the nearest to giving us a pure national art; an age of supreme delicacy, purity and graceful spirituality in Buddhist painting, but especially the age of superb national historical painting. It was then that magnificent rolls, inscribed with the glory and horror of war, were daily issuing from the ateliers of
- ↑ Every collector knows these maki-mono, or pictorial scrolls. Sometimes the long series of pictures told their own tale, but generally the drawings served only to illustrate a chapter of history or legend written in their intervals or on their margins.
