ON A BRONZE BUDDHA IN THE U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM. 1 



By Charles De Kay. 



The fine arts of Japan have been known in the West for many cen- 

 turies and like the cognate arts of China have received the sincerest 

 form of flattery, imitation. Yet a true knowledge is still to come. Be- 

 tween a barbarian contempt for eastern art and the claim of a recent 

 Japanese art-commission returning - from a voyage around the world, 

 that the only living art to-day is that of Nippon, there must be a mid- 

 dle term. We are only beginning to assume toward the oriental mind 

 that attitude of sympathy which is necessary to the understanding of 

 its products. Moreover, we are only on the threshold of the historical 

 and legendary view of the development of the fine arts of the extreme 

 Orient, which forms the second and almost equally important basis for 

 appreciation. So it comes that, notwithstanding the wealth of exam- 

 ples of many branches of the fine arts belonging to the Middle Flowery 

 Kingdom and to Nippon, such matters as porcelain and bronze are 

 still regions largely unexplored. In porcelains the beautiful book of 

 Stanislas Julien is invaluable ; with regard to bronzes from Japan the 

 old writer Kaempfer and the comparatively modern F. von Siebold 

 did excellently for their time and generation, yet have left the field 

 open for separate and exhaustive treatises. 



One branch of art throws light on another. Thus the French work 

 by M. Gonse and the still more useful volumes lately published in Lon- 

 don by Dr. Anderson, dealing as they do very largely with the paint- 

 ings or water colors of the Japanese, will be of inestimable service to 

 the man who has the leisure and talents to devote a book to bronzes 

 from Japan. The present sketch, which revolves round the bronze 

 Buddha lately bought for the National Museum, does not presume to 

 speak of more, than a few pieces belonging to the two chief religions 

 of Japan, namely, to Buddhism, the popular faith introduced from the 

 mainland about twelve hunched years ago by Koreans and Chinese, 

 who brought with them a transformed species of the great religion 

 born in but ejected from India; and to Shintoism, the former state re- 

 ligion of Japan. The latter appears to have been formed from Chinese 



Reprinted by permission of the author from " The Chautauquan," October, 1888. 



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