People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1893 — JAPANESE ART. [ARTICLE]

JAPANESE ART.

Some Wonderful Specimens at the World’s Fair. The significance of the Japanese department of the world’s fair at Chicago lies in the fact that here for the first time has the policy of self-development in modern oriental art an opportunity of justifying itself by results, however immature. By its promotel’s were the government plans for its exhibition drafted and superintended; by its professors and pupils were the most important of the detached works and all of the decorations executed, and through its influence has the prevailing character of native and original design been throughout stimulated. It is well understood by the authorities that Japan’s future position in the world’s art cannot be established by throwing away her special gifts of pure and delicate design, in the quixotic desire to compete with France an<£ America in the field of realistic oilpainting. Neither can she fall back listlessly upon the fame of her past achievements. She must grapple with living problems. She assumes that in her art courses sap enough for new possibilities. While at Vienna, at Paris and at Philadelphia her triumphs were largely in her loan collections of antiques and in modern replicas, at Chicago for the first time has she deliberately dared to be original, and to ask the world’B favor for her contemporary art on its own merits.

Candor compels one first of all to say that to Mr. Kakuzo Okakura, the director of the Fine Arts academy, more than any other one man, is the credit for this wonderful Japanese exhibit due. The wise touch of his advice is everywhere felt, from the architectural casket which reproduces the interesting proportions and decorations of the Biodoin temple at Uji. founded in the eleventh century, to the new departures in shape and glaze of the humblest pottery. In paintings the display is small but choice, the severity of the native juries having apparently exceeded that which has been deprecated in our own. —Century.

A Scotchman, who employs four thousand French women in Paris making lace, has sent a pair of curtains for a bay window. In the six months required for the making of these curtains two thousand different women worked on them. The cost of this single pair of curtains three yards long was six thousand dollars. The Scotchman himself came to superintend the hanging of his fifty thousand dollars’ worth of lace exhibit. Wisconsin has a five-acre patch of cranberries growing, and will harvest a crop in September.