The art of painting was borrowed by Japan from China, the first teachers being the Buddhist priests who crossed over from Korea in the sixth century. This origin, and also the nature of the materials used in the art, stamped it at the outset with qualities which have ever since distinguished it. The ordinary instrument for writing in China and Japan was the brush, dipped in Indian ink, and to form the native characters was in itself an exercise in drawing. Caligraphy, indeed, as penmanship in the old days of mediæval Europe, was reckoned as one of the fine arts; or rather, from the Chinese point of view, painting was reckoned one of the branches of caligraphy. This caligraphic basis is the root of most of the conventions of Chinese and Japanese painting, and in the quality of the brush work are to be discovered many of its beauties. For by means of line alone, not a pen line, thin and hard, but the supple, swelling line of the brush, the artist not only renders the outlines and shapes of things but suggests modelling, chiaroscuro, even the different planes of distance, in a manner indefinable in its subtlety. Colour, except in the later and more naturalistic schools, is used in flat tints only. This absence of chiaroscuro is often quoted as a defect of Japanese art; but if all that can be said has been expressed by line why add light and shade? One has only to study the work of one of their masters in the use of the brush, such an one as Motonobu, of the Kano school, to understand not only how unnecessary it would be but how impossible. We would as soon wish to see filled in one of the exquisite outlines of Flaxman. It is like setting a beautiful poem to music: you may exchange one melody for another, but both cannot exist together. And we must remember that all use of line is a convention, for line does not exist in nature, and Japanese art, after all, only differs in this respect from European art in having used this convention with greater freedom and more consummate mastery.

The simplicity of the means at the artist’s disposal—a brush or two, Indian ink, a few liquid colours, and a sheet of paper or silk—tended to produce directness and simplicity of effect, and this tendency was increased by another influence. The Buddhist priests, then as now, were of a type of mind essentially idealistic. Their religion taught them to regard the spiritual essence of things as the great fact and the outward and visible world as merely a temporary and changing phase, and so in their art, for they were the first painters, they aimed not at a literal transcription of nature but at an expression of its inner significance. And this training has always affected the attitude of Japanese art. Directness, reticence, and restraint are its main characteristics. To present the essential quality of a scene, not its mere outward appearance, and that with the least possible obtrusion of the material, was its object.

Even in later days, in their more naturalistic studies, the Japanese artist never dreamt of drawing direct from nature as we do. His system, the system by which children still learn to draw in Japan, was to look steadily at the object to be depicted until it was learned by heart and could be reproduced at will.

In painting the artist seats himself on the floor, the sheet of silk or paper before him. For a while he gazes abstractedly, till the whole picture is clear to his mental vision. Then with the first touch the central point of interest—the eye of a bird, say—is indicated. Swiftly and surely, with a full brush, the rest of the subject is filled in. There is no niggling, no retouching, for the delicate, absorbent surface of the silk will not stand repeated workings. Each stroke is placed on the picture direct as it is to remain, and, though the result may be a masterpiece, the work, in many cases, is that of a few minutes. The technique of the brush has, indeed, been carried to a degree of perfection by the Japanese artist otherwise unheard of. He fills it, or it may be in the case of a large brush each part of it, with just as little or as much ink or colour as he desires, carefully arranges the hairs in a certain way, for the preparation and loading of the brush is often as important as the actual brush stroke, and then with one single sweep obtains the whole effect he requires. Many are the wonderful tales of the feats which the old masters could perform with one stroke of the brush.

A word may here be said as to the forms which pictorial art assumes in Japan.

The first and most common form is the kakemono, or hanging picture, formed of a sheet of silk or paper, richly mounted on brocade of various colours. It is furnished with rollers like a map, and is rolled up tightly when not in use. This is bad for the surface of the painting, cracks being inevitable if much body colour has been used, but it is a great protection against the fires which are so frequent in the light wooden houses of Japan; for, as there is a considerable space between the picture and the top of the mount, several layers of brocade and tough mounting paper are thus tightly wound round the painting.