Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/378

 days of Jōken-in (the posthumous name of Tsunayoshi). It cannot be said, however, that the artists of the epoch had any new inspiration. With the exception of Ogawa Ritsuō, they merely carried the methods of their predecessors to the highest point of technical excellence and decorative refinement. Ritsuō, called also Haritsu, flourished during the first half of the eighteenth century. He followed the style of Kwōyetsu and Kwōrin in introducing masses of metal into his decorative schemes, but he added also ivory, and, above all, faience. It was for this last addition chiefly that he became famous, for although the idea of inlaying a lacquered surface with faience medallions sounds bizarre, the effect was unquestionably beautiful.

Many exquisite examples of lacquer are to be found in inro produced during the Tokugawa times. The inro, owing to its small size and comparative cheapness, has attracted the attention of foreign collectors, and numerous specimens of great beauty are among the treasures of European and American dilettanti. It shares with the netsuke the charm of offering an almost unlimited field of decorative motives,—landscapes copied from great painters, battle-scenes, incidents from daily life, from history and from mythology, birds and insects of every description, and innumerable studies of flowers and foliage. Almost all the renowned lacquerers from the sixteenth century downwards occupied themselves, occasionally, with the making of inro, but the artists of the Koma and Kajikawa families, through several generations, were especially connected with this class of work, and their signatures are found most frequently. Since, however, the inro is merely one of the objects