Studio: international art (51.1911)

Japanese Art and Artists of To-day.—III. Textiles and Embroidery

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Japanese silk merchants found it more profitable
to sell raw silk, and even silk-worms’ eggs, than the
manufactured article. It is only during compara-
tively recent years that Japanese silks of the width
to which Western buyers are accustomed have
begun to be placed on the market, and a great
revival of the industry has now set in.

The embroidery of Japan has attracted much
attention in recent exhibitions. The screens and
panels which have found so many admirers are
marvellous in their representations of animal life and
in the harmonious blending of colours, and there
is little doubt that several varieties of knots and
stitches hitherto not practised in the West are to be
learnt from these truly magnificent works.

The craft of embroidery is said to have been
introduced into Japan from China fifteen hundred
years ago, and soon came to be very much used
for the decoration of dresses and also for the
representation of Buddhist figures, especially during
the 7th and $th centuries, when some very large
and elaborate pieces of this character were executed.
Kioto has long been and still continues to be a
chief centre of the craft. During the Tokugawa
regime, the embroiderers of this city were divided

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into three distinct classes, one of them executing
the work required by the Court nobles, another
supplying the citizens at large, and the third the
country folk. The craft declined very much when
the feudal system came to an end, but a revival
took place after the exhibitions at Vienna and
Philadelphia in 1874 and 1877, when Japanese
embroidery began to find a good market abroad.

The dyes used in producing Japanese textile
fabrics are of special interest, and it seems probable
that the finest colours are those obtained by the
use of the old vegetable and mineral dyes of Japan.
The ultramarine blue, called “Ai” in Japan, is
obtained from the leaves of a plant still grown in
that country, called Dyers’ Knotweed (Polygonum
aviculare) ■— a near relative of that little weed
which some of us find it so difficult to eradicate
from our tennis courts. These leaves, after a
comparatively simple process, yield a blue dye,
which is not only much more translucent than
indigo, but also free from objectionable smell.
The reds and yellows used to be obtained from
the Safflower, that most ancient of dyes known in
Japan by the name of Beni; but it is little used
now. There are, of course, many other dyes,

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