Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/168

 century. Not less expert were their contemporaries Suwara Yasugoro (art name Zenriusai Gido), Takusai, and Hotokusai. Gido excelled in casting alcove-ornaments in the form of the Dog of Fo (skishi), figures of Hotei, the Genius Gama, and such things. Takusai, who worked in Sado, produced only small objects, chiefly paper-weights, pen-rests and other desk-furniture, imparting to them a beautiful patina; and Hotokusai affected designs in medium relief which he cast and chiselled admirably.

It is often said that after the era of the above ten masters, the last of whom, Somin, ceased to work in 1871, no bronzes comparable with theirs were cast. That is an error. Between 1875 and 1879, some of the finest bronzes—probably the very finest of their kind—ever produced in Japan were turned out by a group of experts working in combination under the firm-name "Sansei-sha." Started by two brothers, Oshima Katsujiro (art name Jōun) and Oshima Yasutaro (art name Shokaku) in 1875, this association secured the services of a number of skilled chisellers of sword-furniture who had lost their métier owing to the abolition of the sword-wearing custom. Nothing could surpass the delicacy of the works executed in the Sansei-sha's atelier at Kobinata in the Ushigome quarter of Tōkyō. Unfortunately such productions were above the standard of the customers for whom they were intended. Foreign buyers, who alone stood in the market at that time, failed to distinguish the fine and costly bronzes of Joun, Shokaku, and their colleagues from cheap imitations that soon began to compete with them, so that ultimately the Sansei-sha had to be closed. This page in the modern history of Japan's bronzes needs little alteration to be-