26 
House & Garden 
The Nipponese Love of Nature Is Preserved In These 
Color-Prints Made by Master Artists 
GARDNER TEALL 
Crows on a Branch by 
Moonlight. After a design by 
Korin, one of Japan’s fa¬ 
mous painters and designers 
{Left) Lark and Violets, a 
Kwa-Cho prmt that is after 
an original by the artist 
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vA-unt) .0, \ z\ s>s\i \a ssmm ssVy 
(Left) Birds and White Wis¬ 
taria. By a modern Japa¬ 
nese Kwa-Cho artist who is 
unidentified 
(Right) Bird and Purple 
A, -Wistaria. -,A\ modems Japa- 
: , nese adaptation of a.Kwa- . 
<s<c;\\Qb@ pint bys 'Miroshige,-. iA : . s 
bsta '^nSSr.ii to\ invroi io:\i sb'u asto oi istsoo-s 
aAT .tawoi infest a *so\ s;m\S aeodo wooa a sUwi 
T! 
HERE is truth 
in the observa¬ 
tion that taste and re¬ 
finement in a people 
are marked by a love 
of nature and the 
beauties which adorn 
it. What would poetry 
and art be without it! 
Perhaps no people in 
the world at any time 
has been so complete¬ 
ly a nation of nature- 
lovers as has that of 
Japan. Occidentals 
are apt to approach 
nature along scientific 
paths; the Oriental 
moves forward through the avenues of art ap¬ 
proach. The appearance of How to Tell the 
Birds from the Flowers found immediate re¬ 
sponse in our risibility for, after all, we were 
conscious that many among us did not know 
whether a crocus was a bird or a blossom, a 
finch, a blossom or a bird! With the Japanese 
it is different. Nature to them is a matter of 
more than names. Their observation is trained 
so thoroughly and with such direct application 
to everything about them, that a Japanese child 
has usually a knowledge of the form details 
of flowers and birds that would make these 
little subjects of the Mikado appear as infant 
prodigies to those of other 
lands. 
Owl and Pine Branch. 
By Hiroshige 
The Nippon Love of Nature 
For centuries the love of 
nature in general and of 
flowers and birds in par¬ 
ticular, has been char¬ 
acteristic of the Japanese 
temperament. While Japan 
received her first art im¬ 
pulse from China by way 
of the Coreans, there was 
long before that time an in¬ 
nate sympathy with nature’s 
garden that merely was fed 
by outside canons and not 
created by them. A Japa¬ 
nese poet, before the 7th 
Century, is translated by 
Huish as writing: 
While this love of 
nature and extraordi- — ■ --A ■• J 
nary powers of obser- Sparrow and Cam- 
vation were held by cilia. After Hiroshige 
the Japanese, their art 
in its earlier phases was strictly guided by 
certain conventions borrowed from the Chinese 
painters. Flowers and birds were, in conse¬ 
quence, drawn in a manner from which there 
was permitted no deviation until the founding 
of the realistic school, centuries after the in¬ 
troduction of Chinese precepts. This is not 
to say that all flowers and all birds were made 
to look alike, or that they were drawn with 
the same strength of stroke. Quite the con¬ 
trary. A fine flower and bird painting by a 
Japanese master of importance can, although 
bearing no signature or seal, be almost surely 
assigned to the artist who produced it. 
Accuracy of Design 
However, there were meth¬ 
ods of evolving the design, 
and things not to be done in 
this evolution that estab¬ 
lished the painter’s rules of 
procedure. Nevertheless, in 
the 10th Century Japanese 
romance, Genji Monogatari, 
pictures drawn directly 
from nature are enthusi¬ 
astically approved, while I 
have seen drawings by Chi¬ 
nese artists in the British 
Museum, dating perhaps 
from the 11th Century, so 
delineated that the species 
they represent can be de¬ 
termined readily by one ac¬ 
quainted with the flora of 
Green Bird on Branch. By 
Hiroshige 
“Should the mountain 
cherry cease, 
In the spring-time of 
the year, 
With its mass of new¬ 
born bloom, 
Us poor mortal men to 
cheer, 
Then would heart of 
spring be doomed 
And its brightness 
fade away.” 
