Studio: international art (58.1913)

Studio-Talk

I was glad to see at the exhibition Shunsho's Rifu Tosendo, Katsunobu Baiyuken, and Yeishun
famous picture Seven Beauties in a Bamboo Forest Baioken, all of them contemporaries of Doshu.
(now in the possession of the Tokyo School of Although their merit is never high, even when
Art)—a group of women leisurely promenading unquestionable, we can imagine that their work
in the shade of a bamboo forest, one reading a must have been quite popular even in high quarters,
love-letter, another carrying a samisen instrument. Among them Dohan might be the cleverest, but
Not only in this picture, but in many other as a Japanese critic says, "his colour-harmony is
arrangements of women and sentiment, Shunsho marred by ostentatious imprudence." Sukenobu
reminds me of the secret of Cho Densu of the Nishikawa was represented by three pictures,
fifteenth century in his elaborate Rakan pictures, Women Hunting Fireflies, soft and delicate,
particularly in the point that the figures, while being the best among them. The other artists
keeping their own individual aloofness, fuse them- represented at the exhibition include Choshun
selves into an impressive and harmonious com- Miyakawa, Masanobu Okumura, Shigemasa Kitawo
position. and thirty-five other names, the pictures, good and
- bad, numbering in all more than one hundred.

It was strange not to see at this exhibition, -

otherwise fairly comprehensive, a proper repre- The time was ripe for such an exhibition as this,
sentation of Harunobu, of Utamaro, and of as the appreciators of our Ukiyoye art have
Hokusai. I think there is some reason in the case doubled and trebled to-day in the West. Although
of Utamaro, as it is known that he left but very the exhibition came, in our opinion, late, we are
few worthy pictures in the original. This was doubt- glad to say that we Japanese are not much behind
less because he made the engraved

wood-block, fortunately or unfortu- __^___......_____

nately, a tower of strength to rise
or to fall by. While I realise the
fact, on the one side, that he was
never accepted in the polite society
of his time, he doubtless gained, as a
direct consequence of the restriction
of his work, a greater knowledge and
power over the medium he affected.

The exhibition quite properly
began with Matabei and Katsushige ;
Naganobu Kano, the former's con-
temporary, was represented in the
series of twelve pictures, Merry-
making Under the Flower, with the
illogical simplicity natural to the
first half of the seventeenth century.
The fact that the name of Ukiyoye
or Floating World did not mean
much in those days could be seen in
the work of Rippo Nonoguchi or
Gukei Sumiyoshi, whose respect for
classical formulae weakened the pic-
torial impression. Mr. Takamine,
the best collector of the Ukiyoye art
in Japan, exhibited the work of
Ando Kwaigetsudo (1688-1715),
Anchi Choyodo, Dohan Kwaiget-
sudo (early eighteenth century),
Doshu Kwaigetsudo, Doshin
Kwaigetsudo, Nobuyuki Kumeido, cloisonne cigarette box and lid by ando juju

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