64 
PACIFIC ERA 
quired. The Barbizon school, the impressionists of all countries, Puvis de Cha- 
vannes, modern illustration, recent decorative design, and especially the work of 
Whistler, have all been strongly motived by its more obvious qualities. Here¬ 
tofore it has been only a superficial and unsystematic study that has produced 
such great results,—rather the sensuous attractiveness, the sketchy breadth and 
flatness of the more accessible, more modern, and less profound of the oriental 
masters. In this way Hiroshige of the print-designers, and perhaps Hokusai, 
have been granted undue weight. The majesty, incisive drawing, mural splen¬ 
dor, and devotional intensity of the earlier schools remain still almost unknown 
to our artists. The power by which a pen-stroke of Sesshu suggests, if not 
surpasses, one by Rembrandt; the breadth of Koyetsu, which far transcends 
not only the range of the oriental printers, but the mural scale of Western 
fresco; the unrivalled movement of crowds of horses, chariots and armed men, 
in the battle-panoramas of Keion; the solemn religious splendor of Kanawoka, 
paralleling Giotto and Orcagna; the passionate love of wild mountain scenery 
in which Kakei antedates all Europe by six centuries;—things like these have 
far greater practical lessons, far more striking suggestions, for a waiting world 
than those already gleaned. The truth is that oriental painting, in its true scope, 
lies just before us in the paths of the world’s advance. The ranges of its 
quality, which we have seen from afar, form no small island coast-line, but 
rise to a hinterland of great continental mountain chains that await competent 
explorers. 
It is the almost unique penetration to this truth that wins greatest credit 
for Mr. Freer. What must Western art-education become, he asks, when only 
the greatest of Asiatic painters are invoked to supplement the inspiration of our 
own? When Tanyu and Korin and Motonobu and Yeishin are actually 
made to read deeper meanings into Velasquez and Hals and Titian and 
Angelico? And here is where Mr. Freer, true to his stringent method, deter¬ 
mines to exclude from his collecting the striking field of Japanese color-prints. 
It is just because they, though the more obvious and first felt of Japanese 
models, form in fact only the skirmish line of the oriental advance. Theirs 
has been an influence heretofore perhaps more negative than positive, spurring 
our curiosity rather than revealing great wealth of achievement. But the 
thirty or forty leading schools that lie beyond and behind the prints, comprising 
the creation of geniuses for twelve centuries, do, if taken together, present such 
a varied mass of constructive beauties in line, notan and color, essentially new 
to us, as fairly to double for the West the scope and depth of art history. And 
there is no fear, Mr. Freer assumes, that the claims of the prints will not be 
fully met by the already existing collections. But of the great Asiatic paint¬ 
ings there is real danger that a representative series will soon lie beyond reach. 
The only other Western series, that in Boston, is dominated more, perhaps, by 
the ideal of historic than of aesthetic completeness. Mr. Freer makes it a 
cardinal point to acquire only specimens of highest and most characteristic 
