The New International Encyclopædia/Japanese Art

​JAPANESE ART. The accepted date of the beginning of fine art in Japan is at the close of the seventh century of the Christian Era. The physical civilization of the country was then greatly advanced by intercourse with China and with Korea. The Japanese scholars have not shown any reluctance to admit the supreme influence of these continental nations upon their own insular arts. The earliest sculptures in stone or wood, and the earliest paintings, some of which are presented in temples and others in the Imperial Museum, show a knowledge of form and of the true value of design arguing an already advanced civilization: while there is no pretense that such a civilization had had time to develop itself in the islands of Japan. The earliest buildings known, such as the Pagoda of Yakushiji, near Nara, universally accepted as of the seventh century, are of a matured type, the beautiful curves of the roofs and the combination of the series of six of these, with the intermediate vertical walls and balconies, into a single design bespeaking an original type already very far advanced toward perfection. In sculpture, the bronze statuettes of these early years are as strongly Indian in character as the architecture is Chinese; but this is in great measure the result of Buddhist influence, and is nearly as visible in what little has been identified as Chinese art of the same epoch. The work in silver and bronze and in woven stuffs shows a sense of the true essence of decorative art such as the later and more splendid times could surpass only in variety and affluence. Thus the group of three Buddhist bronze figures in the Kakushiji temple, of which the tower or ‘pagoda’ is mentioned above, are undoubtedly of the seventh century, and their workmanship, and more especially the modeling of the nude parts, goes far to prove the introduction through India of that influenee of classical Greek art which is so often loosely assigned to the advance of any very early Asiatic school of sculpture. In whatever form it was that the invasion of Alexander the Great, or other active political or mercantile influence, brought to India some specimens of the matured art of Greece, it can hardly be supposed that this influence was absent from the early Japanese sculpture—so frankly based upon nature, and yet so traditionally noble is the statuary of the time in drapery as well as in the larger modeling of the undraped torso and limbs. The paintings of the time are of course more or less injured; but they bear all the marks of a strong and well-understood tradition, with the study of nature for its origin, and with unmistakable binding laws of design. In the eighth century statuary had become more realistic, and the ‘temple guardians,’ or heroic statues of demigods apparently of Brahmanistic Indian mythology, have a ferocious vigor and a large freedom of design which raise these works to the greatest height of artistic merit known to us among the free and representative sculptures of the Far East. It is evident that only at a later date was the strong tendency of Chino-Japanese art toward decorative uses well established. Down to the ninth or even to the tenth century it must have been still uncertain whether these arts would tend, as those of Europe had tended, toward a representative and expressional character, or whether they should reach forward, as they have done, to a decorative excellence accepted as the purpose of the art, and far excelling in variety and completeness that known to Europe.

There are in Japanese history and tradition certain well-marked periods of development and of change. The thirteenth century of the Christian Era marks one of these, during which period the manners of the wealthier and influential classes were, according to all accounts, more severe and deliberately removed from luxury than they had been, and much more than they were to be. Some of the most interesting and impressive pieces of Japanese sculpture belong to this epoch, and it is pleasant to trace a fancied connection between the comparative asceticism of the time and the severe design of these bronzes. Even the more realistic pieces—statuettes in which portraiture seems to be affected—are so severe in the casting of the draperies and so ​simple in pose and gesture that the very realism of the design is lost, as it were, in a kind of traditional dignity suggestive of a firm intellectual control over all the outlying branches of the central school. This influence of severe and restrained design remained unmodified in any serious way down to the accession to power of the Tokugawa shoguns in the sixteenth century. At this time the county was deliberately shut up from foreign influence, partly in protest against the pretensions of the Christian missionaries, and partly to secure an epoch of perfect peace, which, indeed, was gained, and lasted down to the time of the interference of the United States in the affairs of Japan as marked by the appearance of Commodore Perry’s squadron in Japanese waters in 1853–54. During this period the arts became far more sumptuous than before. The abundance and variety of decoration increased very greatly. The richness of detail and brilliancy of color in architecture were matched only by the extraordinary variety of design shown in the minor parts of decorative art, including textile fabrics, metal, lacquer work, and pottery. Painting, considered by itself and in connection with the separate pictures which we know as backed with rich brocades and hung upon walls, or mounted upon portable folding screens, had obtained a prodigious development in China in the twelfth century of the Christian Era; and the direct influence of this continental art upon the painting of Japan is traceable even to our as yet imperfect methods of investigation. The paintings of the Tokugawa period, then, tend toward greater realism and a less fixed and unalterable tradition in the way of design than in the former time.

Architecture. As compared with that of China the architecture of Japan is less massive; and its effects are even more exclusively those of the great overhanging curved roof forming the chief motive of the design—the element which even more than the rounded and swelling cupola in a domed church of Europe, gives character to the whole design. The common use of timber even for buildings meant to be, and sufficiently proved to be, very lasting has deprived Japanese architecture of the ponderous wall and the great arch. The building of the country is therefore essentially that of separate uprights tied and braced together: in other words, timber construction very like in principle to that of mediæval Europe, but more dignified than that because there was in the Eastern land no overmastering style of masonry architecture, like that of the vaulted buildings of Gothic or of neo-classic type, to restrain its development. Whatever was to be done, architecturally speaking, in Japan, was perforce done with the trees of the mountain forests: whereas in Europe that material was generally used only for dwelling-houses, and in some lands for civic buildings, while the ecclesiastical buildings which set the fashion and fixed the standard of what was fine were almost invariably walled and roofed with stone. The result of this is that the architecture of Japan seems to a European rather uniform in character: but it is evident that a profounder examination of the subject would show divergencies as great in the different forms and characteristics of Japanese buildings as we find in the buildings of any European land. The difference from century to century is less, however; and this because of the admitted slowness of all change among Asiatics, and also because of the deliberate action of so many rulers of Japan in keeping new foreign influences away from the land. In detail there are one or two exceptional characteristics which result from this acceptance of the structural type made necessary by the custom of building in wood and framework. This framework has its own necessary characteristics; and these are heightened and emphasized by the use of metal holders for the points of support and the points where one timber is secured to another. Just as the floor-beams in European buildings are often hung in ‘stirrups’ of wrought iron, which hook on to the girder and support the end of the minor beam, thus saving the whole strength of the one piece and giving support to the whole under side of the other so as to avoid all cutting away of the material, so in Japan a metal mount especially affected to the purpose will mark the insertion of one timber into another, the crossing of two timbers of equal size, and also the base and top of a pillar, whether of wood, or, as sometimes happens, of stone. The interior of the often represented ‘Phœnix Hall’ of the Shoguns of the Fujiwara race reigning in the eleventh century of the Christian Era, has retained almost unchanged the beautiful interior effect produced by this system of construction in wood, braced and adorned by wrought metal. These metal mounts are, then, often wrought with delicate surface ornamentation, and gilded in different hues of gold. They may be varied also by elaborate modifications of the edge. The wooden members which they strengthen and adorn are themselves colored not by the coarse-grained painting of the West, but by the exquisitely smooth and delicate coatings of strong color or of metallic lustre producible by the process which we call in a rough generalization that of lacquer. It is, of course, understood that a Japanese interior, as of a dwelling-house, is of extreme simplicity; but this simplicity disappears when there is question of a pavilion or house of entertainment belonging to the sovereign or one of the greater nobles; and this not because of the greater resources of the noble so much as because the building is supposed to be permanent, and has both the exterior and the interior treated with somewhat the same respect that is given to the admittedly everlasting temples of religion.

Decorative Pieces. The minor decorative arts of Japan are known to us as those of no Eastern nation are known, because, in the main, of the sudden breaking up and scattering of the great princely collections during the civil wars of 1868 and thereafter. The daimios or territorial nobles took sides strongly, and all felt the immediate need of raising money by all possible expedients. The result was that Europe and the United States were offered an astonishing number of works of art in pottery, metal-work, woodwork, ivory, and textiles.

By the time when the French Universal Exhibition was held in 1878, it had become possible to classify these works of art by their material, and also in a rough way by their epoch. It appeared then that there was but little to be learned of Japan in the way of porcelain—that chief of the ceramic arts remaining the special property of the Chinese. On the other hand, the Japanese were found to excel in the hard potteries, both highly finished and richly decorated, and also ​rough and apparently careless in design, but in reality showing great independence of spirit and boldness, and ease of manipulation on the part of the village potters. With these there came metal-work in small pieces, and this marked by two strongly distinguished traits. The hammered ironwork and the larger and bolder bronzes were of extraordinary strength of design; the added ornament of extreme delicacy. An iron tray so irregular and arbitrary in form and in the twistings and curlings of its edges as to startle the European, would be decorated by a refined and minute design in gold damaskeening which might rival in delicacy and excel in freedom that of the Moslem East. The other variety of metal-work, was distinguished by its extreme minuteness, and by the delicate play of differing colors: for the Japanese had introduced into common utility three or four alloys unknown to Europe, such as the bluish-black shakudo, the silvery-gray shibuichi, and two or three deep red or pale red alloys of copper; and had also devised the plan of hammering one pierced plate of metal into another in such a way that the resulting surface was waved and veined like a marble of very minute structure. These new metallic colors and surfaces were combined with silver, with gold in several different hues, and with bronze colored artificially in an infinite number of shades, and were used in minute relief patterns, producing the most effective chromatic designs on a very small scale that had ever been seen. A somewhat similar effect of color relief was found to exist in the work of the artists in lacquer. A small box or a panel three feet long might equally become the medium for such adornment. The varnished painting itself having an unmatched toughness and permanence caused by the unequaled material used, the sap of the sumac, Rhus vernicifera, was found to be capable of such manipulation by means of the brush that relief patterns of sufficient projection and of very great flexibility and variety of form were producible in it, and with these reliefs wore combined those of inserted pieces of ivory, of its natural color or stained, of pottery, of mother-of-pearl, and of metal, so that a most elaborate design of flowers, fruits, birds, and small animals would be given in twenty different hues, each carried through an untraceable number of delicate gradations, and the whole combined with a fitting and tasteful background of the smooth and polished lacquer.

Painting and Engraving. The knowledge of natural form shown in these decorative designs was also shown, and even more plainly, in the books of patterns and again in the books of legendary or popular story. Little books filled with prints in outline, or nearly so, or again with their outlines filled up with flat coloring, dealt with the daily manners and customs of the people and with fairy tales, ghostly legends, the dramatic stage, and the doings of heroes and poets of antiquity. The natural history of the archipelago was also treated in great series of hand-books, and in these extraordinary skill was shown in rendering the life and movements of insects, birds, and the smaller animals, while, for some reason not quite clear, the larger animals were less perfectly rendered, as if a traditional way of drawing was to be observed, which greatly affected the draughtsman’s dealings with the horse and the bear, although he seemed to be free when treating the song-bird and the rat. There came also from Japan great numbers of water-color drawings mounted in albums or on rolls, either for hanging up (kakemono) or for handling, like the Roman volumen. Colored wood-cuts appeared, also prints from wood blocks, of which no two were exactly alike in the color, a fact which soon found its explanation in the process used by the printer. He paints the wood block with the brush, and takes an impression immediately, before the color has time to dry; then paints again and takes another impression. A kindred process was in use in Europe in the eighteenth century for those colored prints from stipple engravings which formed the admiration and the puzzle of our own time. The Japanese prints of this character have extraordinary refinement, and have been during the years since 1885 in constantly increasing demand in the West, and at rapidly growing prices.

Bibliography. The architecture of Japan has received no full treatment in a volume. Josiah Condor, in the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects (London, 1886–87), deals with the subject, and so does McClatchie in the Reports and Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. vii., part iii. The arrangement and contruction of dwelling-houses have received the fullest treatment in Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, by Edward S. Morse (Boston, ​1886). There is a valuable chapter in Dresser, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (New York, 1882), and also much in the book of the Imperial Commission of 1900.

The painting of Japan has been treated especially by William Anderson, Pictorial Arts of Japan (London, 1886), a noble folio, and in the same author’s Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum (ib., 1886). Gonse, in the book named below, deals with the subject, but when he wrote few paintings had been studied by the people of the West. Consult, also, Gierke’s Japanische Malerien (Berlin, 1882); also much in the volume of the Imperial Commission of 1900.

As for the decorative arts, which occupy so large a field in the Western ideas of Japanese art, there are very many books on special branches of the subject and on all the industrial arts together. Costly folios are these: Audsley’s Ornamental Arts of Japan (2 vols., London, 1882–85); Audsley and Bowes’s Ceramic Art of Japan (2 vols., London, 1876); Gonse’s L’art japonais (2 vols., Paris, 1883); and especially the folio volume issued by the Japanese Imperial Commission at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Histoire de l’art du Japon (Paris, 1900).