Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/310

 several generations, but none of them attained special skill.

At the time of the second Kinai, the province of Echizen possessed another artist, Kogitsune, who enjoys a great reputation in Japan. Local tradition says that, being ordered to carve a lifelike dragon for the chief of the province, he sat for ten days and nights in the open air at Mikuni, watching the whirlwinds for which that place was remarkable. At last he imagined that he saw a dragon in one of the revolving storms, and the impression was so vivid that he was able to reproduce the monster in iron exactly as he had seen it, a very unusual kind of dragon.

Before dismissing the subject of chiselling à jour in the seventeenth century, reference must be made to Umetada Muneyuki (1650), a Kyōtō expert, who did magnificent work of that nature, several of his masterpieces being made to order of the Shōgun's Court in Yedo; and also to the Ito family, founded by Masanobu in 1670. Masanobu, commonly called Tsuboya Tasuke, or "Tasuke the guard-maker," lived in Kyōtō, and won a high reputation. His son, Masatsune, however, was the artist of the family par excellence. He settled in Yedo, received the appointment of guardmaker to the Shōgun's Court, and was scarcely inferior to the second Kinai as a chiseller of decoration à jour. Representatives of the Ito family continued to work in Yedo down to the Meiji era, and one of them, to whom further reference will be made, now ranks among the masters of the era. The Ito chisellers followed the lead of Akao Yoshitsugu, and worked in shakudo, shibuichi, etc. as well as in iron.

In this context reference must be made to a school