Studio: international art (56.1912)

Studio-Talk

much to encourage them. Some excellent pictures
were turned out by Shunso at this retreat, includ-
ing A Deer in the Forest, here reproduced. His
fifth and final period began with his removal to
Yoyogi, a suburb of Tokyo, and ended with his
untimely death last autumn. The Ochiba (“Fallen
Leaves”), a pair of screens already reproduced in this
magazine (see vol. xlix. p. 104), is perhaps the most
important work of his life, though the artist himself
seemed to have preferred the Spring and Autumn,
a pair of two-panelled screens painted some time
afterwards. A large percentage of his subsequent
pictures bear a striking similarity to Ochiba in
composition and treatment, as well as in colour.
The Forest in Autumn and a pair of six-panelled
screens called Early Spring, his very last work,
show how extremely realistic and decorative his
paintings became towards the end of his life.

It is interesting to note some of the changes
Shunso’s art underwent in course of time. As to
subject, human figures predominated in his earlier
works, followed by landscape, and later by kwacho,
or flowers and birds. At first he seems to have
emphasised the beauty and grace of pure line, then
to have inclined towards the “obscure” style,
giving expression to a feeling for colour rather than
line, and later to have resorted to an extremely

realistic representation of objects in which colour
and line played a very important part, and yet with
the decorative function as the prime object in view,
as shown in his Forest in Autumn. It was with
this idea of the decorative function of the picture
that he endeavoured to give a new interpretation
to the Korin spirit; he strove to be a Korin of the
Meiji era. _

Shunso had many qualities and endowments
favourable for the work he attempted. He had a
natural talent for art. As Shimomura Kwanzan
tells of him, if he were set to work with his friends
at Itsuura with a given amount of the same
material, Shunso would invariably show results far
superior to any of the others in more than one way.
He was, moreover, extremely diligent, and submitted
himself to a long and laborious discipline. The
experimental trend of his mind was a valuable
quality for one trying for a new interpretation of
art, and was brought to bear in a search for new
colours. Often he brought home a bit of clay or
piece of stone he happened to come across, and with
it he tried to prepare the colours he wanted. This
accounts for a strange impurity of colour found in
some of his paintings.

Still another valuable gift he had was his rare