Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/327

 It is not to be inferred, of course, that the omission indicates absence of merit or of celebrity. But at the outset considerable space was devoted to the Goto masters, and it has not seemed necessary to speak subsequently of the various experts born in the branches of the family; for although many of them were great carvers, they did not originate any new style, and the indications given in the appended list of Glyptic Artists are probably sufficient to show the Gotos' share in the development of the art. It may be explained here, however, that in addition to the principal family and its two great branches in Kyōtō—the Kami-Goto and the Shimo-Goto—there were in that city two minor branches; in Kaga a branch founded by Ichiyemon, a pupil of Kenjō, in 1610; and in Noto a branch founded in 1550 by Jinyemon, a pupil of Takujo. Gotō Yeijiro, afterwards known as Gotō Ichijō, was born in 1791 and died in 1876. The second son of the fifteenth representative of the principal family, he was adopted into the branch house of Hachirobei (art name, Kenjō), to whose hereditary pension of fifty koku of rice he succeeded in 1805, taking the names Mitsuyo and Hachirobei. When only nineteen years of age he received a commission to carve mounts for a sword belonging to the Emperor Kokaku, and he succeeded so well that the title of Hokkyo was accorded to him, together with a reward of twenty pieces of silver and five bundles of silk. In his thirty-fourth year he was invited to Yedo by the Tokugawa Court, received a house and a perpetual pension of ten rations, which was afterwards increased from time to time, until, in 1862, he attained the highest art rank, that of Hōgen. Ichijō had no less than fifty pupils, all of whom worked