JAPANESE ART

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 193, 4 November 1927, Page 9

JAPANESE ART

ADDRESS ON COLOUR PRINTS

DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESS Japanese colour printing, its development, and the technique of the process, was the subject of a very interesting address given by Captain G. Humphreys-Davies at the Auckland Art Gallery last evening. To the European eye certain methods of Japanese treatment were apparently grotesque, said the lecturer, but the Japanese attitude toward perspective was nevertheless logical. A European artist looked at his subject from the horizontal plane, but the Japanese artist considered that to avoid the blotting out of one object by another he must regard his subject from a point in mid-air. Each point of view, remarked the lecturer, was equally logical. Explaining the mask-like composure of the faces, Captain HumphreysDavies said that in common with the Greeks and the Romans, and ourselves, the Japanese admired the composure of features and deportment, but in their art emphasised it to the point of conventionality. The lecturer traced the rise of the colour print from about the end of the seventeenth century. From that period colouring commenced to make its appearance on the prints and was gradually elaborated until the highest technical proficiency was reached in the Surimono period, about a century later.

Captain Humphreys-Davies completed his address with an interesting comparison of genuine and “faked” prints.