[Illustration: THE END OF THE DAY AND THE END OF THE FESTIVAL]
The Japanese system of studying Nature in detail, but not with a view to creating a picture, is perhaps especially noticeable in their drawings of women. It would be considered coarse and vulgar in the extreme to paint a woman in the glaring light of a studio, copying every feature and wrinkle, line for line, as you would copy a man. Kiyosai explains that it is impossible to create a beautiful face by drawing direct from life, especially in line. The only way in which it can be achieved is by suggesting a natural beauty on paper, and by imitating a conventional type away from nature. The Japanese have a conventional type of beauty just as we have, and just as the Greeks had years ago--an ideal that has been evolved from the aggregate of myriads of beautiful women,--and this ideal of theirs must be a woman possessing small lips, with eyelids scarcely showing, and eyebrows far above the eyes. The forehead must be narrow at the top and widening towards the base, looking altogether very like a pyramid with its top cut off; the nose should be aquiline, and the whole woman must appear to be the personification of softness and delicacy. The conventional type of a Japanese man has always the legs and arms placed in impossible positions to denote strength, and the muscles are greatly exaggerated.
In the old masters of Japan great importance is attached to flesh markings, more especially in pictures of men. In a sketch of a fat man trying to lift a heavy weight, the action would be suggested in a few swift lines with no shading, but just two small horizontal lines at the back of the neck. Those two little flesh markings portray the fat man to perfection, admirably suggesting both the strain of the action and the bulk of the man. But in talking of the art of Japan and the methods of the Japanese painter, I feel that I cannot do better than describe a day that I once spent with that greatest of all living artists, Kiyosai, at the house of Captain Brinkley. This gentleman invited Kiyosai to come to his house one morning, and I was asked to watch and follow the whole process of his work, and as far as possible to learn from him his theories about painting. It was a splendid chance for me as a painter, especially as Captain Brinkley, who has resided in Japan for many years, and is a Japanese scholar of high attainment, acted as interpreter between Kiyosai and myself.