Excerpt from Exhibition of Japanese Screens: Decorated by the Old Masters; Held at the Galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists, January 26th to February 26th, 1914; Illustrated Catalogue With Notes and an Introduction

In very ancient times it was customary to cover screens with silk or with cloth woven from some sort of vegetable fibre. In the Shoso-m collection a number have a cloth of ivy fibre, and others are covered with some preparation of bark. Later a more generally suitable material was used - an exceedingly stout and very tough paper, said to have been originally brought from Korea. This was almost universally employed in japan down to our own times. Of quite recent years, artists of the more naturalistic schools have reverted to the use of silk.

Folding screens were almost always made in pairs, and the decorative scheme is designed accordingly, either to run through both members of the pair or to answer one to the other in idea and composition. At the same timeit was the ever-present problem of the painter to make each screen acomplete design in itself, so that it might be used alone; more, a screen was not considered well decorated unless any adjoining two or more leaves by themselves made a full and pleasing composition, since it was often desirable to use a screen partly open only. The extraordinary mastery of the science of composition possessed by the old japanese masters is witnessed by their unfailing success in this difficult problem. Gonse quently, although a collector will naturally prefer pairs of screens rather than single members, he loses nothing as regards decorative and pictorial completeness if he acquires a fine single screen.

Some slight note of the differing schools of japanese painting may be useful in view of the references in the catalogue. The oldest screens now existing - the very few - were painted in the purely japanese - the Yamato or Tosa style. The methods of this school developed from those of the Kos� and Takuma schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the earlier periods of this ancient school's existence its members chose their secular subjects chiefly from scenes of war and of court life, though a great part of their energies were given to the production of religious pictures for the decoration of temples. From the fifteenth century forward, however, the range of subjects was widened, and many charming pictures of flowers and birds in particular issued from the studios of the Tosa school, which has endured to our own time.

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