Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/99

kawa, who died in 1792 at the age of ninety-seven, gained more than any other artist from the originals, through his masterly series of twelve pieces, "A Woman's Year," owned by Count Matsura, a most subtle arrangement of figures whose postures reach the final essence of grace perhaps from the delicate command of artistic reserve, the decorative richness of the pictures heightened by life's gesticulation of beauty; whilst the harmony of the pictorial quantity and quality is perfect. Behind the pictures we read the mind of the artist with the critic's gift of appraising his own work. When we realise the somewhat exaggerated hastiness of later artists, for example, artists like Toyokuni the First, or Yeizan (the other artists being out of the question, of course), Shunsho's greatness will be at once clear. It may have been his own thought to modify the women's faces from the artless roundness of the earlier artists to the rather emphatic oblong, from simplicity to refinement, although I acknowledge it was Harunobu's genius to make the apparent want of effort in women's round faces flow into the sad rhythm of longing and passion, a symbol of the white, weary love; in Harunobu we have a singular case of the distinction between simplesse and simplicité. It was the old Japanese art to portray delicacy only in the women's hands and arms; but certainly it was the distinguished art of Shunsho, with many other contemporary Ukiyoye artists,