Cotmania. Vol. III. 1928-9

{handwritten note} Times 35 to [pubb]
{Newspaper cutting}
Oxford, Aug.28 The work of the Congress of Orientalists began in earnest this morning, when papers were read by members in all sections and were followed by discussions. The papers covered many varied subjects.
In the section of Oriental Art, Sir Michael Sadler, Master of the University College, the President of the section, spoke on “Recent Influences of Oriental Art upon Western Painting,” and said that the pictorial art of Japan, and indirectly that of China, began to make a deep impression on Western painting about 70 years ago. But in the last quarter of the 18th Century two English artists and a great English poet showed an affinity to Chinese landscape painting and to the philosophical ideas which inspire it.

FEELING FOR NATURE
Early in the Sung Dynasty one of the greatest Chinese painters wrote that “the artist must lose himself in communion with his hills and streams and the secret of the scenery will be solved.” Those words, which breathes the spirit of the Sung landscape painting, found a counterpart in Western literature when Wordsworth wrote his “Lines on Tintern Abbey” in July 1798. In “The Prelude,” which he wrote between 1799 and 1805, Wordsworth painted on a large canvas what we might compare to a Sung landscape, because of the poet’s thought of Man’s place in nature and of his relation to it was closely akin to that of the great Chinese painters. He spoke of himself as standing “In nature’s presence a sensitive being, a creative soul.”
Wordsworth wrote these poems, went on Michael Sadler, at a time when a passion for landscape had begun to inspire English art. Among the drawings of Alexander Cozens (circa 1720-86), the friend of William Beckford, of Fonthill, there were several Indian ink, which bore a close resemblance in spirit, calligraphy and design to Chinese landscape in the style that derives from the painters of the Sung Dynasty. Another English artist, William Gilpin (1724-1804), painted (like Cozens in monochrome) a series of landscapes in the Chinese manner. Was it only accidental coincidence that these English painters expressed their feelings for the significance of mountains in a manner so characteristically Chinese?
So close to an approximation at the end of the 18th Century on the part of an English poet and of two contemporary English artists to the standpoint of Chinese writers and painters of a much earlier time might be nothing more than a coincidence. A sufficient explanation, so far as Wordsworth’s poetry was concerned, was that the ideas to which he gave expression to in many passages of “The Prelude” appealed to one side of the English Character. The English Character was two-fold. Congenial to one side of it was the harness of everyday life: its discipline, decorum and conventions, the power of social ties endeared by custom, the firm framework of an established economic system, the activity and preoccupations of business, the hum of industry and commerce, the “congregating temper.” The other side of the English Character was restless, vagrant, rebellious; longed to escape at times from the accumulating duties of society, was eager for the freedom of “unfenced regions, unfrequented paths,” for solitude and for the composure it finds in intercourse with Nature. To this mystical side, dominant and persistent in some English temperaments, intermittent and subordinate in others, many passages of Wordsworth’s poetry appealed.
The influence of Taoism produced many masterpieces of landscape in Chinese painting. Similarly, Alexander Cozens, Gilpin and Wordsworth stood on the edge of a great age in European landscape, which though it had drawn its chief power from the art of Holland and Flanders, of Italy and France, contained one element which gave to the drawings of John Sell Cotman and of John Constable a pregnant attribution to the Far East.

POINT OF CONTACT
It was possible however, that Cozens and Gilpin, though they had not seen any of the greatest works by Chinese or Japanese painters, may have been acquainted with some major minor examples of minor Chinese landscape art. Some of the Chinese painted wallpapers which were hung in houses in the 18th Century depict extensive landscapes showing great skill in decorative design. Landscapes painted by Chinese artists on paper or on lacquer must have been often seen by Cozens and Gilpin, both of whom had access to many large houses famous for their art collections. And thought they had no opportunity of studying any of the great masterpieces of Chinese painting they would see enough of the Chinese treatment of trees, water and mountains to be stimulated to the imitation of an unfamiliar but fascinating technique.
The transference of new ideas in the representation of Nature by means of pictures was easy, as rolled paintings and drawings were conveniently portable. The movement of works of art had been from West to East as well as East to West. The infiltration of European art into Japan during the first half of the 19th Century, with its effects upon some of the works of Japanese painters, made it easier for artists and collectors of France, Holland and Britain to appreciate the beauty of Japanese colour prints. It thus prepared a way for a second impact which had been made upon the minds of many Western painters far deeper than that resulting from the fashionable vogue of Chinoiseries during the 18th century. A bright flash of admiration for Japanese colour prints, especially for the works of Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro, shone in Paris during the sixties of the 19th century. In Paris the movement was opportune for the discovery of the beauty and technique of this art, then unfamiliar to European eyes, an art which, steadied and refined by the learning of an ancient tradition and by the discipline imposed through the study of earlier masters, Chinese and Japanese nevertheless frankly and boldly expressed the realities of ordinary life and portrayed the significance of common things.
Holland had for centuries been in close relation to the Far East, and we found indications of Oriental influence in the work of many of her modern painters. The influence of Chinese and Japanese draughtsmanship and decorative design disclosed itself in some works of many brilliant artists in all Western European countries. Oriental art was a leaven in modern European art, not a mere novelty which excited curiosity and imitated reproduction. Its strongest influence on Western painting had been in emphasising the value of sensitive line, of colour harmony, and spacing. It was probable that this influence, already absorbed into the mainstream of European art, would be permanent, though its chief results would be indirect. And as the masterpieces of early Chinese and Japanese art and of Indian painting became more widely known in Europe by means of reproductions, their influence on Western art was likely to increase. {clipping ends here, although article itself would have carried on.}
{Kitson's writing} ‘The Times’ Aug: 29, 1928.