again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.
The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms. Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf, reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in color as clouds pass over.
Japanese drawings of flowers--and they usually draw them beautifully--are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art.