Arizona silver belt., 1895-03-02
JAPANESE ART.
Queer Effects of Tradition Upon
 the Native Artists.
Methods Of the Masters Carried Out to an Exaggerated Extent by the Disciples Of Their Respective sohools-Pe-
 ouliaritles of Flower Work.

Japanese drawings of howers--and they usually draw them beautifully are often influenced in some way by n tradition. The man who invented the method was true impressionist, writes Alfred Parsons in Harpers Magazine, He seized what appeared to him char acteristic of the plant, and insisted on that tO the exclusion of other truths, thus founding mannerism which all following artists initiated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and have ob. served that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not so like the originals as those less popular ones de- pictcd in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no rec ogni2ed method, and where the draughtsman relied entirely on his own observation for his facts, Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as s marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other peoples eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Jap anese methods, get nearer to nature and start a renaissance in Japanese art. The Japanese treatment of land scape is not more conventional that of Claude or David Cox, or than the short hand of our pencil sketches, but it re- cords facts in different way.
 The everlasting question in art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried farther in certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or in others than by Manet, Monet and the modern French, but no one can put in everything; look at d simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against wall and think how long it would take to really initiate all their complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be given by igaoriug others, and the question what is the important thing which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual artist in every country where art is unfcttcred and alive. But in Japanese as in Byzantine and other eastern arts, this question is still de- cidcd by the practice Of past genera. tious, and it will take all the vitality of strong man to infusc new life into it without destroying its many ex- qIisite qualities. Perhaps when Jap anesc artists absorb its spirit instead of merely trying toimttate it's methods, western art may help Tn the direction of freedom; at present fear that it's influence has done more harm than good. The people are 50 quick torccog- nizc the meaning of few lines, and to understand the poetic idea which they suggest, that it is wonder the artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with symbols, for few lines are enough tO convey all the poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art mo- tivpg