Our curiosity has been ... stimulated by the illustrations contained in the Japanese picture books of the most striking features in their scenery. The Japanese are one of the few so-called uncivilised nations who really seem to have an intuitive appreciation of the picturesque. Even the Chinese, who occasionally venture upon representations of scenery, choose some uninteresting subject, and invariably make it subservient to a scene of domestic or military life in the foreground, displaying, more over, an entire ignorance of perspective; but the Japanese portray the grandest scenic features of their country evidently for their own sake alone. Waterfalls and precipices, picturesque villages perched on overhanging cliffs, or rocky ledges running out into the sea, are favourite subjects, and executed with a much more correct notion of art than has been attained in the sister Empire.
Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan (1859)
The idea of producing a thousand ornamental articles precisely alike is entirely foreign to the Japanese. I have never yet seen a pair of bronzes alike in all respects, and one of the great charms of their productions lies in the certainty that each is a separate and more or less independent work of art. That they produce articles in pairs is known to everybody, but while there are general resemblances between the two articles composing the pair, there are also marked differences between them.
Japan: Its History, Traditions, and Religions (1880)
This afternoon I went with friends to the exhibition of students’ drawings at the Model Training School here [in Kobe]. A crowd of visitors were leaving their wooden clogs at the door, for which they received a ticket—like our umbrellas at the Royal Academy. We were the only Europeans in the dense mass of little men and women, and babies and children thronging through the large airy class-rooms hung with the artistic efforts of young Japan. Some of the pencil drawings of still life were very fair, indeed good; but the oil portraits in ‘the European style,’ and drawings from life, were poor; Asiatics cannot yet understand perspective, but no doubt by the time the young critic, aged ten, who stood near us has received his art education they will have learnt to ‘foreshorten’ in Western art-fashion. ‘That is quite a ridiculous picture, I cannot think who can have exhibited it,’ said the small student, contemptuously pointing to the representation of a limp lady very much out of drawing, as he hitched up his dressing-gown and gave another twist to his girdle, and looked the ‘connoisseur’ all over. ‘And pray which do you consider the best drawing here?’ I asked him. ‘Will you first condescend to make your honourable choice?’ replied the little man, in Japanese polite idiom, and afterwards put his finger on what really was the best drawing.
Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World (1883)
In visiting Japanese schools, one is struck with the fact that there is very little life work in the art, and almost no sketching from the object. As all work was from the copy, I often wondered who had the courage or the skill to make the first “copy.” The people are fine imitators, copyists, and often the schools showed me good work, figures that were ably done. To my question, “Was this from the original,” always came the answer, “It was from a flat copy.” I was greatly amused to hear the defence put up in their behalf, that the Japanese were such thorough students of the human anatomy that they needed no object before them. This assumed, of course, the perfect type, and always the same type, and admitted no individuality of form or style, which with us is the mark of genius. To catch varieties, to give the distinct personality of a form, is to us the delight (and the life) of art.
A Woman Alone in the Heart of Japan (1906)
When we go to call on our Japanese friends in the city, they usually entertain us with pictures. These look to us like strange caricatures, but no doubt appear to them perfectly natural, and even to our eyes, as we become more familiar with the land, they lose much of their grotesqueness.
True, the Japanese have no proper idea of perspective, and they put into the picture what ever they consider would look well there, without regard to true size or relative position; but these objects, viewed singly, are all delineated with a great degree of perfection. Thus, trees, birds, flowers, fish and human beings are accurately described as looked at individually, but when grouped together there is a most grotesque disregard of all proportion and proper position. There are but few animals in Japan, and this accounts for the invariably absurd, and sometimes hideous, delineations found on their vases and in the carvings of the temples. It would seem as if they had heard of such things, and their vivid imaginations had attempted to depict them, but in this respect there is an utter failure.
These pictures are, however, interesting as giving us an insight into national life and society which could not be otherwise obtained. We see ancient warriors ready for battle or fighting with brave, composed faces. The dress is very peculiar, and looks to us exceedingly cumbersome. There are pieces of armor for the protection of head, breast and limbs, and we see them bearing all the ancient weapons of war—swords, spears, bows and arrows, and battle-axes—and over all are gorgeous robes with wide, full skirts, and pennons streaming from head and shoulders—a marked contrast to the simple dress and accoutrements of the modern soldier.
We also look at pictures of court-ladies in white robes and with hair streaming down their backs. Their eyelashes and eyebrows are plucked out, but a tinge of dark paint higher up on the forehead supplies the loss. They are represented as playing on the samisen, the ko-to or the bi-wa, and embroidering rich robes, and painting beautiful flowers or butterflies on silk.
Then we have views of the interior of ya-shi-kis, and see the daimios at their great feasts, where the saki is drunk and songs sung, and where geishas and dancing-girls entertain the guests. Or we see these great lords walking in the fields, complacently viewing their broad possessions; and some of the pictures show us farmers kneeling at their feet, begging relief from their oppressive taxation.
We then look into the private reception-room, where sometimes the daimio, in the presence of his retainers, performs the solemn act of Ha-ra Ki-ri (disembowelment). This is done under the sense of a real or imaginary insult; and when a high officer is subjected to the death penalty he has the privilege of inflicting it upon himself, and thus escaping all disgrace.
Many of these pictures represent the jo-ro-reis, which are large establishments where the women live who sell themselves or are sold, when children, by their parents. This is esteemed no particular disgrace in Japan; for a girl to sell herself to relieve the poverty of her parents is considered the highest proof of filial virtue. The names of the most celebrated of these jo-ros are on every child’s tongue, and their pictures are painted in most brilliant colors.
The Sunrise Kingdom (1879)
Everything the Japanese do is picturesque, and the most picturesque places in their beautiful country are always chosen for shrines and temples.
Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World (1883)
The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration. In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste, and the man is considered an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without any leaves.
Notes in Japan (1896)
Japanese drawings of flowers—and they usually draw them beautifully—are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art.
Notes in Japan (1896)
[The Engineering College in Tokyo] is a huge brick building, erected in foreign style, with sixty-six oblong rooms of great height and all the same size. Both house and rooms furnish another curious instance of how Japanese art seems to commit suicide when it attempts to imitate anything foreign, not only in architecture, but also in dress or china, and to a certain extent in furniture.
Japan As We Saw It (Bickersteth) (1893)
I must conclude ... by expressing my conviction that under the new order of things now prevailing in Japan, and more especially on account of the great intercourse between their country and Europe, Japanese artists will make extraordinary strides in the mastery of European art, and will combine with it elements of power and beauty peculiar to themselves. Mr. Jarves and Sir Rutherford Alcock concur, apparently, in thinking that at present Japanese artists “have a technical mastery of other means, not known to genre and landscape painters in Europe, by which they produce effects that place a scene before the eyes in a way to fill the imagination with a vision of things only suggested by the pencil.” I agree with them, for I find no other explanation of the extraordinary pleasure which one experiences alike in seeing the Japanese artist dashing his wondrously effective strokes upon his paper or silk, and in turning over the pages of a book embodying the results of his labour. I have seen the French Tissot, the Neapolitan Martino, the Russian Aivasovsky, and some of our own artists wielding their cunning pencils with swift and startling effect; but no European that I know rivals the native of Japan in artistic legerdemain. From the blending of his traditional and mystic skill with the art familiar to ourselves, we may justly expect to gather rich results hereafter.
Japan: Its History, Traditions, and Religions (1880)
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