Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/301

 in Yedo. The Nagayoshi family of Kaga, who began to work when Kuninaga was at the zenith of his fame, made groove-inlaying a specialty, and devoted themselves through thirteen successive generations almost entirely to that branch of the art, so that they are generally spoken of as the Kaga Zogan-ko (Inlayers of Kaga). It must be noted, further, that Kuninaga, Gotō Kiyoshi, and the Nagayoshi experts of Kaga were not the only famous inlayers of the epoch. Shōami Masanobu (1620), an artist of Kyōtō, produced iron guards with gold-inlaid pictures of the Eight Views of Omi (Lake Biwa), which were the marvel of his time; and Hosono Masamori, also of Kyōtō, working at a still earlier date,—the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century,—showed such skill in hair-line inlaying (kebori-zogan) that by some authorities he is regarded as the originator of that kind of work. Masamori would have been remembered for his chiselling in relief, even though he had not distinguished himself specially as a zogan worker. A contemporary of his, Shōami Nagatsugu, who lived at Hino in Goshiu, was the first to inlay brass with gold, silver, and shakudo, so that inlaying of that kind came to be known as Yoshiro-fū (Yoshiro style), Yoshiro being Nagatsugu's personal name. The use of brass as a field for gold or silver damascening does not, when cursorily considered, suggest fine results. But the soft and tender effects of the combination are admirable. Altogether it may be said that the development of inlaying was a feature of art progress at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The history of this century contains so many incidents of importance that it is difficult to marshal