The Craft of the Sculptor
by
[The Japan Society, $5.00]
SEVERAL months ago a very beautiful volume was published by the Japan Society — beautiful in externals and with an inner beauty of discernment. In place of history or treatise, Mr. Warner gives to all lovers of the distinctive art of Japan eighty-five reproductions of works of art which artists in another clime could never have achieved, and opposite each, with a sensitive accuracy admirable and difficult to compress, he sets a brief, sufficient commentary. Books on art are often sumptuous, sometimes indispensable, but almost invariably they describe a secret they do not disclose. Here, if I mistake not, is a secret made plain. Japanese art, whatever travelers may say, — and those who stop over in Kyoto on their way home from Peiping are argumentatively positive to the contrary, — was made not in China but in Japan. Turn Mr. Warner’s understanding pages, and note that this is true.
ELLERY SEDGWICK