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JAPANESE WOOD ENGRAVINGS
blocks was known to the Chinese in the seventeenth century, and probably much earlier. An excellent example, dated 1701, an album of Birds and Flowers (Ling mao hwa hwui) in the collection of Mr. W. C.
Fig. 1.—Reduced facsimile of a woodcut in the Kwanyin Sutra. Dated 1331. (Author’s Collection.)
Alexander, was shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1889. This work was imitated a few decades later by the Japanese engraver Yamamoto Kihei (1748), and the copy appears to be the first book with colour-printed illustrations published in Japan.
