Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/322

 that he finally hung out this sign: "Orders cannot be quickly executed. Importunity is deprecated."

The Okamoto family of Kyōtō was a branch of the great Okamoto of Hagi (Chōshiu), already alluded to. It was founded in 1750 by Harukuni (originally called Kuniharu), who is known in art circles as Tetsūya-ya Dembei (Dembei the Iron chiseller). Harukuni worked in iron. Although the representatives of his family in Chōshiu were celebrated chiefly for chiselling à jour, he reduced that kind of decoration to a subordinate position, and relied more upon relief carving in all its grades, as well as upon the kata-kiri method. Indeed, by Dembei's time the experts of Kyōtō and Yedo had ceased to make à jour chiselling the principal feature in a decorative scheme. They preferred to utilise such work with reference to its pictorial suggestiveness. Thus a delightful effect of space and atmosphere is produced by clouds chiselled à jour, with a silver moon struggling through them, its disc revealed in the open spaces and concealed by the solid rack; or the sheen of water is obtained by a delicate outline of transparent carving; or the leaves and branches of a tree are projected against the sky by cutting out all intervening portions. Even when the à jour feature predominated, it was always associated with decoration carved in the round, so that it served chiefly to detach the sculptured object from the flat surface.