Studio: international art (15.1899)

Kawanabd Kibsai

battle between a cock and a weasel gives us a
really brilliant study of action; the expression
of two ducklings disposing of a newt would be
irresistibly funny were it not for the serious
results to the writhing victim ; and all the rest
—bats, monkeys, moles, cats, rats, puppies, geese,
insects, tortoises, fishes, crabs and crayfish, are as
truly natural in form and action as they are truly
artistic in grace and vitality.

The Kidsai Mangwa, published in the same
year, contains some of the most laughable of his
drawings. After a sheet of ghosts and goblins, a
couple of comical pages of frogs masquerading as
men, with the peerless mountain itself transformed
into a frog in the background; and a number of other
miscellaneous sketches in the style of the Hokusai
Mangwa, we come upon some evidence of his newly-
acquired anatomical knowledge A score of skeletons
taking part in a whirlwind of festivity, are singing,
dancing, wrestling, smoking, drinking, laughing,
quarrelling, and praying, like a holiday party of
drunken coolies; one of the wrestlers has just
thrown his antagonist, whose component bones lie
in a dislocated heap like a pile of spillikins, while
the umpire, with hand on thigh-bone, waves a

YOUNG KIOSAI SKETCHING THE SEVERED HEAD.
FROM A DRAWING BY HIMSELF

36

skeleton of a fan to celebrate the victory; a
dancer grimaces through the ribs of a skeleton
umbrella; a musician is twanging a skeleton
samisen ; a Shinto priest preaches by the light of
a skeleton lantern ; a studious group surround the
tattered skeleton shreds of a manuscript roll; a
smoker amuses himself by puffing the smoke out of
his hollow orbits, while a drinker is pouring a
draught of sake through his throatless jaws; a
weirdly comic picture. Farther on we are intro-
duced to a horde of demons mimicking the amuse-
ments of Japanese humanity. The Seven Gods of
Good Fortune bathe together a la Japonaise. The
tall-headed Fukurokujiu is being crowned by mis-
chievous schoolboys with a high hat of foreign
shape, poised well beyond his reach on the far-off
summit of his cranium, while the fat priest Hotei,
capped in an East-end " bowler," is rollicking, a
ventre d'eboutonn'e, with a merry little band of
Chinese urchins. Drawings of animals, real and
mythical, demons, trees, rocks, and many things else,
complete the volume. The Kidsai Suigwa, pub-
lished in 1882, is in the same style as the Mangwa,
and full of exuberant fancy and powerful drawing.
The final publications, both issued in 1887, were
an album full of street mummers, the Hd-giva dzu
shiki, and a book in four volumes, the Kiosai
gwa den, which struck out a new line in giving
some biographical details of the artist himself,
illustrated by sketches of various incidents in his
early career. In one of these curious pictures we
see the boy seated by the river bank, surrounded
by horrified townspeople, while he eagerly copies
a severed human head which he had found
floating down the river. Another drawing shows
his eager reception from a peasant of a living
frog, from which he was to make some of his
earliest studies in animal life. Another com-
memorates his first opportunity of drawing a
carp, and we are told how he imitated the fish
scale for scale. Later we see him busily
dashing in a huge dragon to decorate a temple
ceiling under the interested supervision of his
priestly employers. Then comes a dismal
prison scene, in which unfortunately he was
more than a spectator; and by it we may learn
that the life of the delinquent in old Japan was
not a happy one. Yet farther we find him
established as a teacher, and his studio filled
with youthful and energetic pupils, who are
copying from life fowls, snakes, a weasel, and
various other animals; while one of the live
stock, a monkey, having got loose, avenges
himself upon the rising artist who was pre-