Chats on Japanese Prints. Arthur Davison Ficke
sunlit tea-gardens and gay midnight boating-parties of the Sumida River, the great highroads of national travel, the famous spots of popular recreation. Only rarely are there episodes from aristocratic life; and the occasional occurrence of these has precisely the significance of a photograph of a royal house-party shown in a penny paper. The Yoshiwara, as the licensed quarter of Yedo is called, appears in these prints more often than do the garden-parties of noble ladies; the vulgar theatre is shown, but not the classic Nō drama of the aristocracy; it is a Japanese Montmartre, not a Japanese Faubourg St. Germain, that is revealed. The artist's sense of beauty subdues these riotous pleasures of the populace to the severe demands of a beautiful pattern; but it is a whimsical vulgar world, a world of the people, a world of passing gaiety, that he portrays.
The purposes of these pictures were various. "To some extent," says Mr. Frederick W. Gookin, "they were used as advertisements. Incidentally they served as fashion plates. Some were regularly published and sold in shops. Others were designed expressly upon orders from patrons, to whom the entire edition, sometimes a very small one, was delivered. The number struck from any block or set of blocks varied widely. Of the more popular prints many editions were printed, each one, as might be expected, inferior to those that preceded it.... Most of the prints were sold at the time of publication for a few sen. The finer ones brought relatively higher prices, and such prints as the great triptychs and still larger compositions by Kiyonaga, Yeishi, Toyokuni, Utamaro, and other leading artists could never have been very cheap. In general, however, the price was small, and they were regarded as ephemeral things. Many were used to ornament the small screens that served to protect kitchen fires from the wind, and in this use were inevitably soiled and browned by smoke. Others, mounted upon the sliding partitions of the houses, perished in the fires by which the Japanese cities have been devastated; or, if in houses that chanced safely to run the gauntlet of fires, typhoons, cloudbursts, and other mishaps, their colours faded, and their surfaces were rubbed until little more than dim outlines were left."
The plebeian origin of the prints explains why the cultivated Japanese have not, as a rule, looked upon them with much enthusiasm. Only now, when the greatest print treasures have gone out of Japan, are a few Japanese collectors beginning to buy back at high prices works which they allowed to leave the country for a song. The admiration of Europe and America has awakened them to a realization of the distinction of the prints, in spite of the undistinguished nature of their subjects; and the day will come when the Japanese themselves will be the most formidable bidders at the sales of great Western collections.
The interest of Western collectors in Japanese prints is of comparatively recent origin. As late as 1861 it was possible for a writer on Japan to regard them with blank indifference. There is a rare little book by Captain Sherard Osborne, printed in that year in London, called "Japanese Fragments." It contains six hand-coloured reproductions of prints and a number of uncoloured cuts, all from prints which Captain Osborne had purchased in Japan. In the following words he makes reference to Hiroshige, who is now generally ranked as one of the supreme landscape artists of all time: "Even the humble artists of that land have become votaries of the beautiful, and in such efforts as the one annexed strive to do justice to the scenery. Their appreciation of the picturesque is far in advance, good souls, of their power of pencil, but our embryo Turner (i.e. Hiroshige) has striven hard ..." etc. In 1861, perhaps, few people would have believed it possible that to-day many serious judges might question whether any product of European art has ever matched the designs of these "humble artists."
The earliest of European collectors was, according to Mr. Edward F. Strange, a certain M. Isaac Titsingh, who died in Paris in 1812. M. Titsingh had for fourteen years served the Dutch East India Company in Nagasaki; and among his effects were "nine engravings printed in colours." Doubtless he had acquired them merely as curiosities, without any perception of their artistic importance. Mr. Strange notes that four prints were reproduced in Oliphant's "Account of the Mission of Lord Elgin to China and Japan" (1859); and, as we have seen, Osborne devoted some desultory attention to prints in 1861. These are, perhaps, the chief evidences of early European interest.
Subsequently such events as the International Exhibition in London, 1862, the Paris Exposition of 1867 and that of 1878, and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, 1876, served to bring a few prints to the notice of Western amateurs. Particularly in Paris was intense interest in them aroused among painters and literary men. From 1889 to 1891, S. Bing was bringing out in Paris his magazine Le Japon Artistique, whose pages contain many fine reproductions of notable prints. In 1891, Edmond de Goncourt issued his volume on Utamaro. Other books followed rapidly. In 1895, Professor Anderson issued his small but important monograph on "Japanese Wood Engraving." In 1896, Fenollosa's epoch-making catalogue, "Masters of Ukioye," was published in New York, establishing for the first time the foundations of all our present knowledge of this field, and pronouncing judgments from which the consensus of later opinion has, in the main, never departed. The same year brought forth de Goncourt's "Hokusai." Mr. Strange's "Japanese Colour Prints" appeared in 1897. In the same year, Von Seidlitz issued his "Geschichte des japanischen Farbenholzschnittes" (published in England as "A History of Japanese Colour Prints" in 1900), which remains to-day the most comprehensive and accurate single treatise on the subject.
Of recent years, the growth of interest and the increase of books has been rapid. Eager collectors have scoured the world to bring to light new masterpieces; Japan has been ransacked so thoroughly that the would-be purchaser can perhaps more wisely go to London or Paris or New York than to Tokyo or Kyoto in his search for prizes; and the places of honour accorded these sheets in the portfolios of discriminating collectors and great museums leaves no doubt as to the esteem with which they are regarded. Values have been multiplied by tens and hundreds, so that to-day the supreme rarities among prints are beyond the reach of the ordinary purchaser.
All this is due neither to accident nor to any strange freak of whimsical tastes. It has come about because the prints are in fact artistic treasures. Commonplace and trivial as the subjects of most of them are, they rise by virtue of the quality of their execution to a very high point—masterpieces of composition, triumphs of colour, monuments of the power of human genius to impose its sense of rhythm, form, and harmony on the appearances of the seen world.
But as is true in the case of any art, the content of the colour-prints is not to be grasped at a first glance by the casual passer-by. Familiarity with the aims selected, the conventions employed, and the achievements possible is necessary before the specific charm of these works makes itself manifest. It is the experience of most print-lovers that, starting with perhaps a mere casual liking for a certain landscape design, they progress gradually, in the course of years, to an unmeasured delight in the whole body of prints, and eventually find in them a unique source of repose and exaltation.
There are certain peculiarities, common not only to prints but to Japanese art as a whole, that require a special effort of the Western mind before they become acceptable. The first and most vital of these is the absence of realism. "Throughout the course of Asian painting," writes Mr. Laurence Binyon, "the idea that art is the imitation of Nature is unknown, or known only as a despised and fugitive heresy.... A Chinese critic of the sixth century, who was also an artist, published a theory of æsthetic principles which became a classic and received universal acceptance, expressing as it did the deeply rooted instincts of the race. In this theory, it is rhythm that holds the paramount place; not, be it observed, imitation of Nature, or fidelity to Nature, which the general instinct of the Western races makes the root-concern of art. In this theory every work of art is thought of as an incarnation of the genius of rhythm manifesting the living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the gross impediments of complex matter allow to be transmitted to our senses in the visible world around us. A picture is conceived as a sort of apparition from a more real world of essential life."
It will, therefore, be vain to expect in Japanese designs any production that will astonish the spectator by its life-likeness, its fidelity to an actual scene. Eastern art has never attempted to compete with the work of photography. Its function is the function which the European public grants to poets but not always to painters—the seeking out of subtle and invisible relations in things, the perception of harmonies and rhythms not heard by the common ear, the interpretation of life in terms of a finer and more beautiful order than practical life has ever