Studio: international art (14.1898)

Photography and Colour-Printing in Japan

bility of employing far richer keys than ordinary
wall-painting allows, which results from the con-
trasted planes of a modelled surface, that separates
colour-relief from other methods of painted decora-
tion. In England mural decoration in fresco, a
modification of true fresco, has failed to become
acclimatised. But with coloured bas-relief we touch
a new variant that is already proved to accord with
our taste and architecture and interior decoration,
and has a brilliant future before it.

HOTOGRAPHY AND COLOUR-
PRINTING IN JAPAN. BY
M. R. HILL-BURTON.

The beautiful old Japanese art of
chromo-xylography was in a state of advanced
decadence when photography entered the empire
along with vaccination, European dress, and other
innovations in 1873. Under the skilful manage-
ment of Mr. Ogawa the two have been woven
together into a process which, if not a creative art,

is one of the most perfect methods of reproduction
at present in use.

Mr. Ogawa is one of the host of young men of
the Samurai class who, when the fall of the old
order of things cast them upon the world with
nothing left of their nobility but a good name and
a few curios, turned their minds to the European
industries. Though photography, pure and simple,
had at that time only dawned upon Japan, he con-
ceived the idea that his vocation lay in the develop-
ment of reproductive processes in his native
country, and with that view he spent a few months
in America studying photography.

The University of Tokyo accidentally gave the
art a further lift by adding to its staff a young pro-
fessor of engineering, brim full of Western science
and apostolic zeal in matters photographic. He
desired nothing more than disciples, and over the
empire photographic societies have sprung up—
cheerful, informal bodies, where Japanese and
foreigner, rich amateur and struggling professional,
aid each other on the path of knowledge. At the

CHRYSANTHEMUM GARDEN

FROM A JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPH

245