International studio (59.1916)

■ STUDIO
VOL. LIX. No. 235 Copyright, 1916, by John Lane Company SEPTEMBER, 1916

Religion and nature in ori-
ental ART—IN TWO PARTS
BY WILFRED SHAW
Part I
The illustrations are from pictures in the Collec-
tion of Mr. Charles L. Freer
The recent growth of interest in the Far East
is a significant development in modern art criti-
cism. For the first time in history the work of
the sculptors and painters of China and Japan is
being adequately presented to us of the West.
From it we are learning that by no means all the
secrets in the world of art have been revealed to
us, and that many of our own aesthetic princi-
ples are capable of a restatement in new terms.
We have learned, too, that landscape painting,
which we believed to be the unique achievement
of our modern painters, was the keynote of Chi-
nese art as far back as the Tang Dynasty, 1200

years ago. Impressionism, we find, at least when
it deals with fundamental conceptions rather
then mere technique, is nothing new to the
Chinese. Even more, some of the vague ideas
we are associating under the very modern “futur-
ist” propaganda were known and put in practice
by a civilization already past its last great period,
as long ago as when Marco Polo visited the court
of the Mongol conqueror, Kublai Khan, at the
end of the thirteenth century.
But let us begin in the middle of our subject,
and look at a picture of this Chinese civilization
through the eyes of this first visitor from the
West to tell us what he saw.
The Venetian traveller tells us, in his account
of his travels through Cathay, of how he came
to the “most noble city of Kinsay, beyond dis-
pute the finest and noblest in the world,” which
had a compass of an hundred miles, with twelve
hundred bridges of stone, each with a guard of
ten men, with twelve guilds, of different crafts,


FOUR-FOLD SCREEN, BY OKIO. SHITO SCHOOL. JAPANESE

XLVII