but it has a decided childishness and insincerity about it. The spiritual element has all fled; and the materialistic gaiety which remains can never be mistaken for true artistic inspiration."[1]
Of the four artists who constitute exceptions, Sansetsu (see above) is the last representative of the old Kano school, according to Fenollosa really an anachronism in the seventeenth century, as his style belongs wholly to the sixteenth. Sotatsu, who, after Utanosuke, is the greatest flower-painter of Japan and one of the greatest colourists of his country, was Korin's teacher and even more gifted than he. He is already breaking with the linear style, and inclines to renderings by pure brushwork. A picture of a group of chrysanthemums may be found in Binyon (pl. 25). Hanabusa Itcho, of Yedo (1651–1724), a pupil of Kano Yasunobu, was also one of the greatest colourists of this school, and distinguished himself, as Tanyu did, by his original representations of scenes from popular life; a list of reproductions after his drawings will be given in the next chapter. Anderson gives a reproduction after him in his Japanese Wood-Engraving, No. 9. Lastly, Korin, the celebrated lacquer-painter, who lived from 1660 to 1716, came of a middle-class family, by name Ogata, in Kioto, spent a part of his life in Yedo, and then returned to his native town, where he remained till his death. He was a pupil of Sotatsu, but Tsunenobu and Yasunobu are also mentioned as having been his teachers. Thanks to the largeness and originality of his style, he has become the best known among Japanese painters, and fully deserves his high repute by virtue of the force of his creations, which stamp themselves ineffaceably upon the memory and remind us of the works of the remote primitives, though without ever imitating them. The peculiar position that he occupies, as the
- ↑ Fenollosa, Review, p. 28. For the following, see the same, pp. 29, 33 ff.; Anderson, Transact., p. 355 f.; Brinckmann, p. 192 ff.
