Page of eight small Japanese landscape scenes in ink by Hokusai: villages, a river, a bridge, temple roofs, a torii gate and pines, each built from white paper, gray tone and black.

History · Foundations

Dow, Japan and Notan

Japanese prints reached Western artists after Japan reopened to trade in the 1850s.

Painters such as Degas borrowed their elongated formats and off-center layouts. In Boston, Arthur Wesley Dow built a course shaped by Japanese art; his book Composition appeared in 1899.

  • He taught three elements: line, notan and color.
  • Notan, Japanese for "dark-light," is the arrangement of light and dark shapes.
  • His preface credits Ernest Fenollosa of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, who lectured in Dow's first such classes, in 1889.

Image: Project Gutenberg · Public domain

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