n to elaborate on it with finer work, until in the end
they produce a picture that has high finish, but possessing all the
action and spirit of a first impression.

[Illustration: THE END OF THE DAY AND THE END OF THE FESTIVAL]

The Japanese system of studying Nature in detail, but not with a view to
creating a picture, is perhaps especially noticeable in their drawings
of women. It would be considered coarse and vulgar in the extreme to
paint a woman in the glaring light of a studio, copying every feature
and wrinkle, line for line, as you would copy a man. Kiyosai explains
that it is impossible to create a beautiful face by drawing direct from
life, especially in line. The only way in which it can be achieved is by
suggesting a natural beauty on paper, and by imitating a conventional
type away from nature. The Japanese have a conventional type of beauty
just as we have, and just as the Greeks had years ago--an ideal that has
been evolved from the aggregate of myriads of beautiful women,--and this
ideal of theirs must be a woman possessing small lips, with eyelids
scarcely showing, and eyebrows far above the eyes. The forehead must be
narrow at the top and widening towards the base, looking altogether very
like a pyramid with its top cut off; the nose should be aquiline, and
the whole woman must appear to be the personification of softness and
delicacy. The conventional type of a Japanese man has always the legs
and arms placed in impossible positions to denote strength, and the
muscles are greatly exaggerated.

In the old masters of Japan great importance is attached to flesh
markings, more especially in pictures of men. In a sketch of a fat man
trying to lift a heavy weight, the action would be suggested in a few
swift lines with no shading, but just two small horizontal lines at the
back of the neck. Those two little flesh markings portray the fat man to
perfection, admirably suggesting both the strain of the action and the
bulk of the man. But in talking of the art of Japan and the methods of
the Japanese painter, I feel that I cannot do better than describe a day
that I once spent with that greatest of all living artists, Kiyosai, at
the house of Captain Brinkley. This gentleman invited Kiyosai to come to
his house one morning, and I was asked to watch and follow the whole
process of his work, and as far as possible to learn from him his
theories about painting. It was a splendid chance for me as a painter,
espe