"Old Japan" which all now know and appreciate, because the works of the Artisan School have carried its fame round the world!
The king of the artisan workers was he whom we call Hokusai, though his real original name was Nakajima Tetsujirō, and his pseudonyms were legion. During the course of an unusually long life (1760-1849), this man, whose only possessions were his brush and his palette, poured forth a continuous stream of novel and vigorous creations in the form of illustrations to books and of separate coloured sheets, illustrations and sheets which included, as Anderson justly says, "the whole range of Japanese art-motives, scenes of history, drama, and novel, incidents in the daily life of his own class, realisations of familiar objects of animal and vegetable life, wonderful suggestions of the scenery of his beloved Yedo and its surroundings, and a hundred other inspirations that would require a volume to describe." Contemporary workers in the art of colour-printing were Toyokuni, Kunisada, Shigenobu, Hiroshige, and others in plenty. Then, in 1853, four years after Hokusai's death, came Commodore Perry, the mere threat of whose cannon shivered the old civilisation of Japan into fragments. Japanese art perished. Kyōsai, who survived till 1889, was its last genuine representative in an uncongenial age. His favourite subjects had a certain grim appropriateness:—they were ghosts and skeletons. Charity compels us to draw a veil over the productions of many so-called painters, which, during the last two decades, have encumbered the shop-windows of Tōkyō and disfigured the walls of exhibitions got up in imitation of European usage. They seem to be manufactured by the gross. If not worth much, there are at least plenty of them. Meanwhile, here and there, a lover of the national traditions still goes on painting the old subjects nearly in the old way.
Japanese art is distinguished by directness, facility, and strength of line, a sort of bold dash due probably to the habit of writing and drawing from the elbow, not from the wrist. This, so to say, calligraphic quality is what gives a charm to the merest rough Japanese sketch. It has been well remarked that if a Japanese
