20th Fuly.
Proressor: H. A,.GiLEs's " Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art" (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, Ld.) is a most useful companion to Dr, Bushell's handbook on "Chinese Art," written for the Board of Education, South Kensington, which was -recently noticed in our columns, It is, of course, impossible for Professor Giles to give in 171 pages a history of the art which, he says, "has influenced ce many hundreds of millions for so many centuries prst;" the troup' e is, that the voluminous existing treatises in Chinese on Chinese Art have never found a translator, and in consequence Europ2an would-be writers on the subject have had no material to employ. "The present volume," we are told, "is intended to serve at any rate asa temporary stopgap, being for the most part composed of extracts from authoritative works, here translated: for the first time, thus exhibiting something of the. theory of Chinese pictorial art from the point of view of the Chinese themselves." It might be epprebended that such a sketch as this is, ranging over period of 4,500 years, would necessarily be dry; but Professor Giles's books never are dry, and this book is so full of anecdote—a form of biography of which the Chinese are excessively foud,—that there is nota dull page in it, These anecdotes show that the artist was the same man a thousand years ago in China that he is now in Europe; most of them would be accepted as perfectly probable if they were told of European painters of any period including the present. Here is note by the statesman, poet, philosopher, and artist, Ssu Tang-p'o, who flourished in the 11th-12th centuries: "If you want to get, at the natural expression of. a man, you should secretly observe his behaviour with other: people; but nowadays he is made to adjust his hat and clothes, and sit down and gaze at some object"——Mr. Sri foresaw exactly what_ the ordinary photographer would do when that art was invented.—"The result is that he puts on a face which is nob his; how then cin you expect to reach his real self? Men keep their. thoughts each in some particular spot, such as the eyes and eyebrows, or the nose and mouth, Ku K'ni-chih" (who flourished 1,400 years ago, and an original painting by whom ig in the British Museum)
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.