PACIFIC ERA 
65 
beauty. In value of aesthetic suggestion his treasures probably thus surpass 
any private collection in Japan. 
But Mr. Freer has penetrated to another supreme truth, yet almost unrecog¬ 
nized by Western critics, that ancient Chinese painting is not only the parent 
of much in Japanese but in its highest ranges, the superior. It was in the Tang 
and Sung dynasties, from the seventh century to the thirteenth, that a great 
table-land of grandeur in Chinese art became lifted far above the ordinary 
levels of life, feeling, and power. The figure work of Godoshi and Ririomin 
(Wu Tootse and Li Lung-mien) and the landscape paintings of Kakei (Hwa 
Kuei) have supreme excellencies to teach not only Japan, but all the world. 
It is more than a plausible prophecy that foresees American art of fifty years 
hence taking enormous leaps under the stimulus of Mr. Freer’s oriental master¬ 
pieces. He possesses the sixteen large portraits of Buddhist saints by Ririomin, 
which have ranked for centuries as supreme in Japan, and are now brought 
into comparison, for line creation, with Phidias, Michel-Angelo, and Raphael. 
The painting of “The Divine Sustenance of Man” by Godoshi of the eighth 
century, represented on Mr. Freer’s walls by a Chinese copy of the twelfth, 
is surely one of the grandest and profoundest creations of all time. 
The organic relation of Whistler’s life-work to the great range of Japanese 
and Chinese painting, should now be apparent. It is not only as an im¬ 
pressionist, as an interpreter, that Mr. Freer forces him to face such trying 
rivalry. It’s because, in his independent discovery of tehcnical secrets he has 
divined more of their many ranges than if he had consciously copied. The 
very varnished gold-leafs against which Koyetsu throws, in his matchless 
screens, a shower of cool opaque greens, are exactly paralleled by Whistler in 
his “peacock room” decoration. How Whistler would have jumped could he 
but once have seen the Rakan portraits by Ririomin! And yet, in more than 
one of the “Arrangements” Whistler has achieved a vast sweep of pure line 
that suggests Ririomin. And it is through their mutual relation to Whistler 
that the kinship of Greek and Chinese art “proves.” 
It needs no wizard to discern the bearing of oriental painting upon univer¬ 
sal pottery. We should have to repeat here much already said in comparison 
of the latter with Whistler. The ancient silks and parchments, too, are dull, 
warm, and opaque, and the colors, always at least translucent, fall over them 
in an irridescent film that suggests enamels. Thus a mural painting by Kano 
Yeitoku, a tea-bowl by Kenzan, and an oil sea-scape by Whistler, achieve 
similar delicious tone-effects. The supposed American genius of the future 
will find, in the thousand keramic blends of Mr. Freer’s grounds and glazes, 
an entirely new palette, as it were, from which Godoshi, Bayen, Sotatsu, Okio, 
and Whistler himself, have painted. It is true that we might almost equally 
include here the effects of such older Europeans as Giorgione, Moretto, Velas¬ 
quez, and Rembrandt; but Mr. Freer rightly holds that it would be im- 
