F the lovely “Land of the Rising Sun” should, during one of those volcanic throes which threaten her extinction, sink forever beneath the depths of ocean, she would yet live for us through the magic brush of Hiroshige. Gazing at his landscapes, the airy wing of imagination wafts us to a land of showers and sunsets—a fairy scene, where the rainbow falls to earth, shattered into a thousand prisms—where waters softly flow towards horizons touched with daffodil or azure tinted.

Here is a gliding sampan with closed shutters. Inside, the lantern’s diffused light throws a silhouette upon the bamboo curtain, a drooping girlish head bending towards the unseen lover at her feet. Ripples play upon the water, stirred by the amorous breath of oriental night. In fancy we hear the tinkling of the samisen, touched by delicate fingers, sweetly perfumed.

Now we see rain upon the Tokaido. A skurrying storm. Affrighted coolies running this way and that. A mountain full of echoes and horror. Down it splash rivulets, running into inky pools. Darkness and terror and loneliness, and longing for warmth and shelter and the peace of home.

In marked contrast is one of the “Seven Impressions of Hakone.” A glad reveille. The sun breaks out, the clouds have burst asunder, masses of vapour float here and there. All is chaotic, untamed, a palette wildly mingled.

The Japanese so dearly love Nature, in all her moods, that when she dons her mantle of snow they hesitate, even when necessity compels, to sully its purity. In one of Utamaro’s prints, sweetly entitled by M. Edmond de Goncourt “La Nature Argentée,” a little musüme is seen searching the snowy landscape she loves, and, hating to blot the beautiful carpet, she cries, “Oh, the beautiful new snow! Where shall I throw the tea-leaves?” With Hiroshige, the artist of snow and mist, we feel this love, and so successfully, does he deal with a snowy landscape that we see the snow in masses, luminous, soft and unsullied, as if Nature had lent a helping hand to portray her pure white magic. So, without formula or technique, but absolutely and sincerely, he unrolls the winter pageant before us.

The Japanese landscape painter sums up nature in broad lines, to which all details are more or less subordinated. This rendering of the momentary vision of life and light,—the spirit, not the letter of the scene,—is what is meant by Impressionism. Whereas, however the French impressionists express light by modelling surfaces, the Japanese adhere rigidly to line, and rely upon gradations of colour and the effect of washes to produce the illusion of light. Their landscape is expressed in clear-cut lines and flat masses of colour. In the prints this virtue of abstract line is exemplified, the outline being the essential element of the composition, for upon line and arrangements of balanced colour the artist must depend, cramped as he is by the necessities of the wood-cut. And here he displays his wonderful ingenuity, his fineness of gradations and opposition, his boldness and infinity of device, and in spite of the limitations which hamper him, he realizes absolute values in the narrowest range, by virtue of his knowledge of lines and spaces.

“No scientifically taught artist,” said Jarves, “can get into as few square inches of paper a more distinct realization of space, distance, atmosphere, perspective and landscape generally, not to mention sentiment and feeling.”

This virtue of the line is the inheritance of the Japanese, the consummate handling of the brush almost a racial instinct. From China, far back in the centuries, came the sweeping calligraphic stroke, of which in Japan the school of Kano became the noblest exponent. “L’école,” said M. de Goncourt, “des audaces et de la bravoure du faire, l’école tantôt aux écrasements du pinceau, tantôt aux ténuités d’un cheveu.”

As soon as the tiny hand of the Japanese baby can grasp the brush its art education begins. The brush is the Japanese alphabet—it is their fairy wand, their playmate—they learn to paint intuitively, though later the most assiduous study is given to acquire the characteristic touch of the school with which they affiliate. The brush is their génie, subservient to their imagination; they master and “juggle” with it. For no foreign taught technique will they barter their birthright.

And our masters and instructors in art more and more recognize the value of initial brush-work. The following excerpt from Walter Crane, in Line and Form, might serve as a preface to a work on Hokusai or Hiroshige: “The practice of forming letters with the brush afforded a very good preliminary practice to a student of line and form. An important attribute of line is its power of expressing or suggesting movement. Undulating lines always suggest action and unrest or the resistance of force of some kind. The firm-set yet soft feathers of a bird must be rendered by a different touch from the shining scales of a fish. The hair and horns of animals, delicate human features, flowers, the sinuous lines of drapery, or the massive folds of heavy robes, all demand from the draughtsman in line different kinds of suggestive expression.”

We are told that Hiroshige began his career by making pictures in coloured sands on an adhesive background, to amuse the public, and perhaps this artistic juggling helped him later in arranging his schemes of colour, for the limitations of the block demanded almost equal simplicity in composition.

The impressions of Lake Biwa, one of Hiroshige’s finest series of views, serve as a beautiful illustration of the almost exclusive use of line in bringing out the salient characteristics of the landscape. His sweeping brush shows us volcanic mountains, encircling the lake, like rocky billows, torn and jagged, for legend says that as the peerless mountain Fuji-san rose in one night, so the ground sank, and the space was filled by the beautiful lake named from its resemblance in form to the Japanese lute. The trees which fringe the shore, black and misty, upon close inspection resolve themselves into a network of criss-cross lines and blotches. The sampans’ sails, the waves, the rushes on the shore, the roofs of the village nestling beneath the cliffs, are all adroitly rendered by horizontal lines and skillful zigzags. The rest of the composition is a wash of shaded blues and grays, fading towards the horizon into smoky violets.

Biwa, the beautiful, suggestive of mystery, the four-stringed lute gives thee her name. Through the music of thy rippling eddies do sighs well up in thee, the murmur of the lost? A pall of darkness hovers over thee, pierced by a gleam of sunshine, beckoning like a lover’s hand.

Much diversity of opinion exists with regard to the identity of the artist, or artists, who designed the prints signed Hiroshige. The latest research, however, justifies the assertion that there was but one landscape painter, Hiroshige the Great.

The pupils,—notably one, who, among other names, signed Shigenobu, until after his master’s death, when he took the title of Hiroshige the Second, gradually assuming his full nom-de-pinceau, Hiroshige Ichiryusai,—faithfully imitated his style, also amplifying the multitudinous designs and sketches made by the master, yet the genius of the great artist is stamped upon his work, and as a clever critic tersely says: “Everything he touched was his autograph.”

Mr. John S. Happer, an indefatigable student of Ukiyo-ye and collector of nishiki-ye gems, during diligent research, discovered a clew that leads, beyond controversy, to the right attribution of the prints signed Hiroshige, and which he intends later to make public. Nearly all the important vertical sets, he says, most of which have been ascribed to the second Hiroshige, are by the first artist, although doubtless his pupils assisted him in his work, rendering their aid, as did the pupils of Hokusai in the preparation of the Mang-wa. Hiroshige also associated himself at times with other artists, one set of the Kisokaido, for example, being in part the work of Keisai Yeisen, and he supplied many backgrounds to the prints of Kunisada and Kuniyoshi.

In the catalogue of the “Collection Hayashi” only two prints are assigned to pupils of Hiroshige, one of them bearing the signature of Shigenobu.

The masterpieces signed Hiroshige are all by one great genius, the Apostle of Impressionism. “Hiro, Hiro, Hiroshige, great is Hiroshige,” cries Mr. Happer, in an outburst of enthusiasm. “Before Hiroshige there was no Japanese landscape master,—after him there is none.”

In the “Happer” Collection is a memorial portrait of Hiroshige by Kunisada (Toyokuni), the inscription upon which is of especial interest, confirming, as it does, the date of his death and proving that the “Meisho Yedo Hiak’kei,” the vertical set of Yedo views, so often ascribed to his successor, were by the master.

The inscription is thus quaintly interpreted by a Japanese student:

“Ryusai Hiroshige is a distinguished follower of Toyohiro, who was a follower of Toyoharu, the founder of the Utagawa School. At the present time, Hiroshige, Toyokuni and Kuniyoshi are considered the three great masters of Ukiyo-ye,—no others equal them. Hiroshige was especially noted for landscape. In the Ansei era, 1854-1859, he published the ‘Meisho Yedo Hiak’kei’ (‘Hundred Views of Yedo’), which vividly present the scenery of Yedo to the multitude of admirers.

“About this time also appeared a magazine entitled ‘Meisho Zuye’ (‘Sonnets on Yedo Scenes’), a monthly, illustrated by Hiroshige, and displaying his wonderful skill with the brush, to the admiration of the world. He passed away, to the world beyond, on the sixth day of the ninth month of this year, 1858, at the ripe age of sixty-two (sixty-one by our count). He left behind a last testament, or farewell sonnet, ‘Azuma ji ni fude wo no-koshite tabi no sora; Nishi no mi kuni no Meisho wo Mimu.’ (Dropping the brush at Azuma, Eastern Capital, I go the long journey to the Western Country, Buddhist Heaven is in the West, to view the wonderful sceneries there; perchance to limn them too.)

“This by Temmei Rojin, picture by Toyokuni.

“Dated, Ansei 5, ninth month (October, 1858).”

The best known prints by Hiroshige are the “Fifty-three Stations between Yedo and Kyoto.” This Tokaido series was at first beautifully printed, but the later impressions show a sad decay in the colouring. The “Yedo Haik’kei” or “Hundred Views of Yedo,” give a panoramic vista of the Shoguns’ capital. The pictorial description of Yedo, in black and pale blue, is a lovely series. In many of these landscapes the Dutch influence is very marked, for the master of Hiroshige, Toyohiro, from whom he derived the first syllable of his nom-de-pinceau, had experimented in landscape painting after the Dutch wood-cuts which were scattered throughout the country. Although Hiroshige is best known through his landscapes, he, like most Japanese painters, was too universal an artist to confine himself solely to one branch. He loved every phase of nature, and in one of his well-known prints, “The Eagle,” his skill in the delineation of birds is best shown. In the later impressions a pale yellowish tone takes the place of the beautiful steel-blue background of the earlier prints, miracles of colour printing.

Athwart this background of ineffable blue, which loses itself in the mists that veil the sacred mountain, is seen, sweeping and sailing cruelly alert, the evil eagle of Hiroshige. His wicked gaze is set on nests of murmuring wood-doves, he eyes the callow sea-birds in their bed of rushes. The temple bell rings solemnly; the long vibrations cleave the azure dusk. It is the hour of rest and dreams. Begone, base harbinger of evil!

In the early prints by Hiroshige the colours are most beautiful, one soft tone fading imperceptibly into another, the blues and greens so marvellously blended as to be almost interchangeable. We are told that Michelangelo loved the companionship of the old workman who ground his colours; and of the Japanese, it is said, “this making one family of the greater artist and all who had to do with him has given that peculiar completeness, that sense of peace and absence of struggle which we feel in Japanese art.”

In vain Hiroshige fought, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, against introduction of cheap and inferior pigments, which were taking the place of the native dyes—Nature’s gifts, distilled by her artist children. Reds, yellows, blues and greens, intense and crude, were now imported, and Western commercialism sapped the virtue of the sincere and devoted artists and artisans of the Orient.

In describing the effect of colour in one of the Nikko temples, W. B. Van Ingen throws a searchlight upon the chemical secrets of this splendour, which he tells us, if asked to describe in one word, that word would be “golden.” “These colours,” he says, “are not imitations of colours. If vermilion is used, it is cinnabar and not commercialized vermilion which is employed, nor is something substituted for cobalt because it is cheaper and will ‘do just as well.’ Each colour is used because it is beautiful and frank as a colour, not because some other colour is beautiful. If lacquer is the best medium to display the beauty of the pigment, lacquer is used, and if water is better, lacquer is discarded, and if these colours are not imitations of colours, neither are they suggestions of colours. Pink is not used for red; if it is used at all, it is used for its own beauty, and feeble bluish washes are not made to do service for blue. The Oriental has not yet learned the doctrine of substitution; he knows that substitution is transformation.”

The secrets of colouring of the early prints, the joy of Parisian studios and which inspired Whistler, are lost. The delicious greens of old mosses, the pale rose tints, the veinings and marblings, the iridescent tints of ocean shells, the luminous colours of the anemone, the bleus malades des mauves—that divine violet, a benison of the palette handed down by those old Buddhist monks, the earliest painters of India and China.

These visions of colour are taking the place of obscurity and gloom, for the great impressionists, Claude Monet, Manet, the Barbizon school also and its disciples, have abjured the old dark shadows and substituted violet washes, seeming to share the privilege with the saints and sages of “seeing blue everywhere.” All true artists live “within the sphere of the infinite images of the soul.” These seers are their own masters, and, as Theodore Child says so exquisitely, “they are of rare and special temperaments, and through their temperament they look at nature and see beautiful personal visions. They fix their visions in colour or marble and then disappear forever, carrying with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual processes.” Such a special temperament was bequeathed to Whistler. He submitted himself to the Japanese influence, not imitating but imbibing oriental methods, and following them, notwithstanding Philistine clamour, for the English art doctrines of the time were diametrically opposed to these innovations. Regardless of sneers, he followed the bent of his genius, which led him into oriental fields. He felt the sweet influence of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige. He took advantage of the centuries of thought given to drapery, in the land where, as with Greece, dress is a national problem; where no fads and follies of fashion fostered by commercialism are allowed; where the artists design dress, and the people gratefully and sincerely adopt their ideas.

When we can follow them and allow art to rule, then hideous vagaries and vulgarities, distortions of the figure by hoops and wires, and monstrosities in sleeves will cease. Then may we hope to be an æsthetic nation. We need our American Moronobus to design and embroider and paint dresses for their beautiful and intuitively tasteful countrywomen.

The colour vision of the Oriental far surpasses our own. His eyes are sensitive to colour harmonies which, applied to landscape, at first seem unreal, impossible, until we realize that though they present objects in hues intrinsically foreign to them, yet the result justifies this arrangement, and its integrity is recognized, for the impression we receive is the true one. And this chaotic massing of colour we notice in a landscape by Hiroshige was employed by many of the old masters. Of the stormy passion of Tintoret, Ruskin says: “He involves his earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and withdraws through circle flaming above circle the distant light of paradise.”

There is a keynote to art, as to music, and to genius; through the inner vision this harmony is revealed. It lies within the precincts of the soul, beyond the reach of talented mediocrity, however versed in the canon of art. Nor can this occult gift be handed down. The most ardent disciples of Raphael tried in vain to express themselves after his pattern. The sublime inspiration which found its fullest outward manifestation in the Sistine Madonna rested there. The poets realized this colour vision, for Dante cried—

“Had I a tongue in eloquence as rich
As is the colouring in Fancy’s loom.”

Inspiration must be sought by other than mechanical means. Have not the most inspired revelations of colour come to the great master, William Keith, when, invoking the aid of his old temple bell, its lingering vibrations yielded to him rich secrets of colour harmony, as the song of the bell revealed to the soul of Schiller the mystery of life and birth and death, which he crystallized in his immortal poem?

This is the keynote of Impressionism, the touchstone of art. What a fairy wand was wafted by Whistler, standing upon Battersea Bridge! “The evening mist,” he said, “clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become Campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us!”

Leaning upon the bridge, the sweet influence of Hiroshige permeating his soul, in the crucible of his fancy he blent with the radiant Orient a vision of old London, grimy and age-worn, and realized “a Japanese fancy on the banks of the gray Thames.” To this picture he set the seal of his brother artist, and so the two apostles of Impressionism, Occidental and Oriental, in that loveliest nocturne, will together go down to posterity.