Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/324

 yoshi, did not fall greatly short of Nagatsune himself in ability. Both worked in Kyōtō.

The only remaining names that need be especially referred to in the history of the eighteenth century are those of Kusakari Kiyosada (1790), generally known as Kusakari Hachisaburo, who is said to have been the greatest inlayer that ever worked in Sendai; Shichibei (1700) of Kyōtō, whose fame as an inlayer procured for particularly fine work of that nature the term Zoshichi; and Ito Kiyoyasu (1750) of Yedo, the first to become celebrated for the variety of inlaying called sumi-zogan.

By more than one Western critic of Japanese metal-work it has been asserted that a period of decadence set in before the middle of the nineteenth century, and that all productions subsequent to the year 1835 or 1840 show evidences of deterioration. It would be very difficult to discover any valid grounds for such a statement, nor is it endorsed for a moment by Japanese connoisseurs. Everywhere dilettanti may be found whose estimate of the merits of a work of art ascends with the cycles that have elapsed since its production. But that kind of picturesque romance belongs to a special domain of sthetic education, and while its contentions are partially admissible so long as they refer to a Sōmin, a Yasuchika, a Naomasa, or a Kinai, they must be set aside ruthlessly when they do flagrant injustice to the numerously peopled school of fine artists in metal who worked for Japan during the first seven and a half—not the first three—decades of the nineteenth