International studio (23.1904)

Hashimoto Gaho

entirely, subjective; the world to us is a stage that
we tread with all the arrogance of a “Star,” who
assumes the other actors, the scenery, and supers
to be only “supporting ” him. In fact, we peep
through microscopic lenses at the macrocosm of the
universe, whereas the Japanese, habituated to a
consciousness of the universal, discovers therein a
key to the problems of his life and art. The con-
crete becomes to him merely a formula in which a
portion of Universal truth is expressed. It is the
Truth itself that he is chiefly interested in, so he
does not elaborate the formula, as we do in our
worship of the concrete, but reduces it to its simplest
terms. He does not build a palace for the Spirit,
in which it becomes shut in from view, but the
lightest of cages, through the delicate open-work
of which the Spirit may be visible. Hence his
striving after simplicity both in technique and in
motive.
For this worship of the Universal and habit of
approaching the study and practice of life from the
point of view of the Universal, does not lead the
Japanese to loose and lazy thinking, or to profitless
research. On the contrary, to the keenest analysis,
he joins the closest synthesis, and, as he is not
obsessed by the concrete, he regards the end as of
more importance than the means. It isn’t, for
example, the fact of possessing guns and ships and
all the paraphernalia of a first-class fighting nation
that has intefested him lately, but the larger issue
that there was a certain little matter to be cleaned
up once and for all. Yes, a “little” matter; for it
is itself only a necessary means to a still larger end,
the material and spiritual regeneration of the East.
So our side of the world has been treated to the
amazing discovery that the most complete and
extensive exhibition of practical resourcefulness
has been made by a nation whose guiding principle
is Idealism. It should set our educators to thinking,
and not escape the attention of our teachers of art.
For, to return to the application of these remarks
to Japanese art, it is significant that the decline of
their art during the nineteenth century was marked
by an increasing disposition of the artists to value
the means more than the end. During the first
seventy-five years, in which the usurpation of the
Shogunate was being gradually broken up and the
authority of the Emperor restored, the Kano family
of artists, which had existed for three hundred years,
sank into a condition of the worst kind of trades
unionism. Teaching was confined to copying the
pictures of the Kano school; only the Kano methods
were permitted, and any deviation from these, or
any exhibition whatever of originality was rigidly

punished. Pupils were terrorized into complete
submission to the Kano traditions.
It was under these that the first period of Hashi-
moto Gaho’s life was spent. During the second
he was occupied in freeing himself from dry formal-
ism by an exhaustive study of the older Japanese
and Chinese schools, whereby he obtained such
facility of technique and insight into its possibilities
as a vehicle of expression, that now, during his
third period, the originality of his genius has full
liberty and play.
He was born in 1834, of a family that had been
artists for several generations; at seven years of age
was taught how to draw and paint, and at thirteen
entered as a pupil of Kano Shosen Utanobu. A
year later he lost both father and mother, and was
received as a poor art student into the boarding
school of art in the street of Kobikicho, in Yedo
(Tokio). After four years’ pupilage, he was
assisting his master in decorating some doors for
the Shogun’s palace; at twenty years’ old became
head pupil, and at twenty-six discontinued the life
of a boarder and took a house in the ground of his
master’s dwelling. He then married and for a few
years enjoyed a life of modest independence. But
the tragedy of Rousseau’s life was repeated in his;
his wife went mad, and, to the labor of caring for
her and their four children was added the bitterness
of poverty, for the prospects of art were at their
worst, since Japan was engrossed in absorbing
Western methods and ideas. The essential of the
time was material, and literature and the fine arts
for the present languished. Reduced to the ex-
treme of want, he was forced to gain a pittance of
a livelihood by making bridges for guitars and link-
ing together metal rings for chain armor, mean-
while struggling on with his artistic studies and
taking comfort in the friendship of that other great
modern artist, Kano Hogwai.
But light broke at last, when in 1871 the Imperial
Naval Academy was founded and Gaho received
the appointment of instructor in drawing. After
holding the position for fourteen years, he resigned
to co-operate with Hogwai and Mr. Okakura in the
Investigation Bureau, that was charged with the
study of Western art methods, and finally resulted
in the establishment of the Tokio School of Art.
In this he filled the post of teacher of Japanese
painting, until in 1898, his resignation following
that of Mr. Okakura, the principal, the two inagu-
rated a private school, the Nippon Bijutsuin, with
Gaho at its head.
The object of this institution is to revive the lost
ideals of Japanese art, to stem the inrush of West-

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