Book Description

Excerpt from Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum Tm: paintings and drawings described in the following pages were brought together in the course of a residence of over six years in Japan, for the purpose of illustrating an ancient and remarkable phase of art in its historical, intellectual, and technical develop ments, and the principal motives by which it has been inspired. The great majority of the works are Japanese, but a number of ancient and modern Chinese pictures have been added to demon strate the relationship between the arts of the sister empires. In the construction of the catalogue it has been judged advisable, in view of the novelty of the subject to Western readers, to give a larger amount of general explanation than would be necessary in a similar work on European art: the pictures have been classified according to schools, and to each group is prefixed an account of the main facts in the history of the school, with a list of the principal artists whose names have found a place in native biographical records; and, lastly, the legendary and other motives have been dealt with more or less in detail. It was originally pro posed to introduce a preliminary sketch of the. History, technique, forms, and characteristics of sinico-japanese painting, together with a review of the various applications of pictorial design; but as such an essay would have led to an inconvenient increase in the bulk and expense of the volume, and was judged to be more suitable to a private undertaking, I have therefore made it a separate work, incorporating with it such extracts from the catalogue as might be necessary to give completeness to the historical section, and illustrating it with reproductions of the more typical examples of the art. It is now in course of publication by Messrs. Sampson Low 6: Cc., under the title of The Pictorial Arts of J apan. The present collection, although comprising representative speci mens of all the various schools, must be regarded only as a nucleus. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.