of Japanese art by the influence of China. The Buddhist priest, Chodensu, who in 1409 painted his famous picture of the death of Buddha, is by Anderson compared with his contemporary Angelico, but from Fenollosa's description he must have represented rather a revival of the powerful style of Kanaoka. He died in the year 1427, at the age of seventy-six. His masterpiece, the priest Shoichi Kokushi seated, is reproduced in Tajima's work, vol. vi.; a shoki as devil-queller in Binyon (pl. 13). His contemporary, Josetsu, according to some a Chinese priest, according to others at any rate educated in China, developed a still more enduring activity by establishing a school for painting in Kioto, by which the Chinese style was again brought into repute and from which proceeded a series of the most important painters, such as Soga Shubun, Sesshu, and Kano Masanobu. Josetsu himself painted principally landscapes of delicate execution, but not in accordance with the style then prevailing in China, which flourished afresh under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but in that of the remote Sung period (960–1278), the productions of which, even in China itself, are still counted as unsurpassable models. Nen Kawo, who worked about the middle of the fourteenth century, is mentioned as a predecessor of Chodensu and Josetsu.[1]
Josetsu's pupil, Soga Shubun, a Chinaman naturalised in Japan, painted landscapes, figures, birds, and flowers in the style of his master; as a painter he is perhaps more remarkable than Josetsu, and more especially in landscape painting, he occupies one of the first places in the history of Japanese art. His works are chiefly executed in Indian ink and lightly tinted. Anderson[2] gives a reproduction of one of his landscapes. Among his pupils we may mention Sotan. Of still greater importance
