324 ART INDUSTRY AND RELATED OCCUPATIONS. 



Japanese sagas and heroic legends, which furnish abundant material. 

 To this group belongs the representation of the Shichi Fuku-jin, 

 or the seven gods of good fortune. 



Certain combinations exist as a rule in all the subjects borrowed 

 from nature. The most general of them are : the bamboo cane 

 and the tiger ; the mume plum and the nightingale (Uguisu) ; sun- 

 rise with the pine and the crane ; the lion and the paeony ; the 

 deer and the maple; the crane and the turtle (symbols of happiness 

 and long life) ; the pine bamboo and mume ; the bulrush and the 

 silver heron ; bamboo-cane and sparrow ; rain or willow and 

 swallow ; lotus flower and silver heron. The homeward flight or 

 alighting of wild geese, the awakening of nature in spring, the 

 snowfall and other natural incidents furnish popular decorative 

 themes. (Compare Table VII.) 



The Chinese representations of these and other objects are fre- 

 quently clumsy and not very true to nature. Especially with 

 tree-forms their wild fancy plays wayward tricks, putting leaves 

 and flowers together which belong to very difi'erent species or are 

 not to be found at all. Their work often shows glaring colours and 

 tasteless combinations, particularly in the ordinary market wares. 

 For example, at the great Paris Exhibition of 1878 there was to be 

 seen a Chinese screen with paintings on silk which represented 

 among other things, a blue convolvolus which twined itself around 

 the blossoming branches of a pomegranate tree ; on the tree was a 

 fanciful bird with a yellow breast, and on a rock at the foot stood 

 a cock toward which a dragon fly was flying. No Japanese artist 

 would choose such combinations, because they are unnatural, and 

 his sense of colour would forbid him. China maintains its con- 

 spicuous rank among the countries of Eastern Asia, because of its 

 size and its commercial and political importance ; but in its bearing 

 toward Christian civilization, in its government, institutions and its 

 influence upon our industrial art, Japan is far in advance. 



Though the Japanese were for centuries blind admirers and 

 imitators o f their Western neighbours and masters, they are so no 

 longer. Itv the beautiful scenery of their own country they find 

 the most of those decorative themes which have been introduced 

 from the West in clumsy and distorted forms. Many of these objects, 

 especially those which their own hills cannot furnish, they plant in 

 their gardens and the parks of their temples, and what they admire 

 and gaze upon with such pleasure here, the natural productions of 

 their own land, become their subjects in art. To delight in nature, 

 sitting quietly at her feet to watch her in her life and work, and to 

 render back the fleeting and pleasing picture with warmth and 

 truth as it was felt and seen, this is gradually becoming the found- 

 ation principle of Japanese industrial art. 



The pictures with which the Japanese love to adorn their vases 

 and trays, their screens and costly silk embroideries, are therefore 

 the expression of a refined taste, of practised observation of nature. 



