Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/369

 edition these sheets, toned in black, grey, and light red, are of extraordinary sharpness; there are said to be also some pulls in black or in red only.

With this work Hokusai began the series of publications that relate to instruction in drawing; it is probable, therefore, that about this time he attained a special reputation as a teacher; until the year 1823 there followed in quick succession various works of this class. In the year 1812 itself there appeared the first volume of the Riakugwa hayashinan, "Rapid Lessons in Abbreviated Drawing," which was followed in 1814 by the second; a third appeared undated. In the first all objects are reproduced by segments of circles, and also partly by squares; in the second Hokusai depicts himself holding brushes in both hands, in his mouth, and with both feet (illustrated by Goncourt in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, pér. iii. t. xiv. [1895], p. 441); in the third the drawings are brought into the form of idiographs. In 1813 appeared his studies of nature, Shashin gwafu, fifteen polychrome sheets of various content, coloured, of medium lateral format, usually collected in two albums, one of his best works (illustrated in Perzynski, No. 20). From 1816 dates the Santai gwafu, the album of the three different kinds of drawing (in the strong, the withered, and the dead style), signed Taito, in two colours, medium size. From 1817-19 there appeared in two volumes the Yehon hayabiki, "Rapid Review of the Art of Drawing," on every sheet some fifty or sixty human figures in outline, the heads generally indicated only by an oval, to prove that a face can be drawn without features. In 1813, the Hokusai gwakio, "the Mirror of Hokusai's Drawings," large (in the second edition called Denshin gwakio), with the Shashin gwafu of 1814, the principal work of this kind. 1818, Hokusai gwashiki, "Hokusai's