Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/260

116 of the works of his early period, when he was competing with Harunobu, is a large and beautiful print, representing two lovers playing go on the terrace of a garden, while a woman stands and looks on. He borrowed his orange-red from Koriusai. He was one of the first to learn the rules of perspective from the Europeans, and employed them, e.g., on the large oblong print of the performance of a No-dance at the court of a nobleman. He was, moreover, one of the founders of landscape renderings, and could also represent crowds with great ability (Tokio Catalogue). His pupils were Toyohiro and particularly Toyokuni, of whom we shall treat later. Another probable pupil of Ishikawa Toyonobu is Ishikawa Toyomasu, who worked at the same time as Harunobu, Shunsho, Toyoharu, and Shigemasa, and is dated by Fenollosa about the year 1770. He executed a series of the twelve months. The Hayashi Catalogue (No. 347) contains a reproduction of one of his works. Toyohisa is also mentioned as a pupil of Toyoharu (illustration in Hayashi Catalogue, No. 1015).

Here we must also mention a contemporary of Toyoharu, Shiba Gokan (or Kokan) who was born 1747 and died 1818. He signed himself Shun, Shumpa, Fugen Dojin, and Kungaku; in daily life he was known as Katsusaburo. He was a pupil of Harunobu, whose manner he continued after the death and under the name of the master. He is mentioned as the first Japanese artist who learned the rules of perspective from the Dutch and applied them in his book of travels, Gwato saiyudan, 1781. He is also said to have been the first to execute copperplate in Japan, but Burty (Catalogue, No. 455) mentions as the first attempt in this technique a meisho (book of travels) consisting of thirty-one oblong sheets, of the year 1849, which would thus