The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Hokusai is now generally regarded as one of the world’s great artists, worthy to rank with Rembrandt, Durer, and other giants. His ‘River Scene’, with the great bridge over the water and Fujiyama in the distance, shows his unsurpassed skill in the technique of his art, the largeness of his view, and the intense human interest with which he invested every scene he painted. A master of the first order as a draughtsman, Hokusai was also a daring pioneer as a colorist, being the first to combine the particular greens, blues, yellows, and browns which distinguish his famous series ‘Thirty six Views of Fujiyama,’ to use the telling contrast of red, bright blue, and brown seen in his ‘Views of te Loochoo Islands’, and to harmonise with infinite tenderness a whole gamut of greens and blues in his great designs based on carps. Hokusai lived to a great age, his death occurring when he was approaching his ninetieth birthday, and shortly before he expired he murmured, ‘If Fate had given me but five more years, I should have been able to become a true painter.’ He was not only one of the greatest and most poetic of the world’s artists, he was one of the most modest.

The beginning of the artistic influence of Japan on Europe is generally dated from the International Exhibition held at London in 1862, when the examples of Japanese art there shown made a profound impression on all who studied them. Seidlitz, in his History of Japanese Color Prints, gives the same date, but this authority traces the first discovery of Japanese art in Europe to a Japanese shop in the Rue de Rivoli, Paris. This shop, known as ‘La Porte Chinoise’ and owned by a dealer name Soye, was frequented by a number of artists who delighted in the color prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others which they found there. To this shop came Manet, Degas, Monet, and other French artists afterwards to become famous, and to it also came a young American artist, James McNeill Whistler. The Japanese have a perfect instinct of decoration and consequently these color prints made an immediate and powerful appeal to a young artist who already had within him the instinct of decoration. In the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige, Whistler recognized those qualities which above all he desired to have in his own work.

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)