Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/136

 not their attention been directed to China by the general impulse of art development that followed the accession of the Ming monarchs, it is not improbable that they would never have evolved the great academy of landscape painters which numbered Sesshiu, Shiubun, Oguri Sotan, Soga Jasoku, and Kano Motonobu. This is not the place to speak of such matters in detail; the broad fact alone need be noted that for all the disorder and unrest by which the Military epoch was marked, it saw the birth of a great art movement under the Ashikaga Shōgun, and the rapid development of the movement under the Taikō. The latter it was whose practical genius did most to popularise art. Although his early training and the occupations of his life until a late period were of a nature to suppress, rather than to educate, æsthetic tastes, he devoted to the cause of art a considerable portion of the sovereign power that his grand gifts as a military leader and a politician had brought him. Not only did he bestow munificent allowances on skilled artists and art artisans, but he also conferred on them distinctions which proved stronger incentives than any pecuniary remuneration, and when he built his celebrated palace—the Castle of Pleasure—at Fushimi, so vast was the sum that he lavished on its decorations, and such a certain passport to his favour did artistic merit prove, that the little town of Fushimi quickly became the art capital of the Empire, and the residence of all the most skilful