BRONZE-CASTING, ETC.
be set up in a temple at Hakata. Of Hasegawa Kumazo there is not much to be said. He follows the fashions of Seimin and Tōun, and many of his pieces are not at all inferior to the best works of those artists, but he has never been induced to forge the cachet of any of the old masters.
Occidental influence has been felt, of course, in the field of modern Japanese bronze-casting. At a School of Art officially established in Tōkyō in 1873 under the direction of Italian teachers,—a school which owed its signal failure partly to the incompetence and intemperate behaviour of some of the foreign professors, partly to a strong renaissance of pure Japanese classicism,—one of the few accomplishments successfully taught was that of modelling in plaster and chiselling in marble after Occidental methods.[1] Marble statues are out of place in the wooden buildings as well as in the parks of Japan, and even plaster busts or groups, though less incongruous, have not yet found favour. Hence the skill undoubtedly possessed by several graduates of the defunct Art School—notably by Mr. Ogura Sōjiro—has to be devoted chiefly to a subordinate purpose, namely, the fashioning of models for metal-casters. To this combination of modellers in European style and metal-workers of such force as Suzuki Chōkichi and Okazaki Sessei, Japan owes various memorial bronzes and likeness effigies which are gradually finding a place in her parks, her museums, her shrines, or her private houses. There is here little departure from the well-trodden paths of Europe. Studies in drapery, prancing steeds, ideal poses, heads with fragments of torsos attached (in extreme violation of
- ↑ See Appendix, note 19.
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