Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/213

Rh senting a mother and child. By the addition of brown he even occasionally changed his blue into an olive green, as in the large and beautifully composed sheet of the two dancing girls, in which the green and red is also modified. In part he achieved the mild and subdued, yet powerful elegance of his tones by special mixtures of colour, partly also by printing them one over the other, whereby he enriched his scale of tints. It is remarkable that in his rather heavy treatment of colour, neither black nor white plays a considerable part. He too was active in book-illustration; illustrated works by him appeared at Yedo in 1760 and 1776. In his productions actors predominate; see the sheet of about 1760 illustrated in Fenollosa (Outline, pl. vi.). In addition, however, he drew scenes of daily life, bath scenes, and in Bing's Catalogue (No. 19) there is also mentioned a print with birds. Strange reproduces, on page 24, a woman preparing tea. In the Jaekel Collection at Greifswald there is a large oblong three-colour print by him, which is composed as a triptych, but printed undivided from a single block; it represents a gentleman promenading with two ladies, with Fuji in the background. The same collection possesses a four-colour print, large oblong, in which red and green predominate; it was probably done about 1760, and represents three geishas sitting in a room and playing with cushions. About the year 1763, following the example of Harunobu, who in the meantime had been making his experiments, his blue appears perfectly pure; but the cheerfulness of this young pioneer's colour-scheme was never quite attained by the older artist. He remains the chief master of the short ascendancy of the three-colour print, the general effect of which was apt to be somewhat sombre. As no black and white prints, so also no genuine polychrome prints by him seem to be known.

According to Fenollosa (Outline), the fundamental colours of the three-colour print, which seems to have developed in the