Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/55

RV 35 masters had the honour of holding the position of "painter laureate" (edokoro), post created in the year. After Kanaoka the greatest artist of the school during the Heian epoch—namely, from the ninth to the twelfth century—was Hirotaka, a prince of the blood, whose works are said to have stood out from the canvas like living pictures. He occupied himself chiefly with religious pictures, whereas two other masters of the school at the same epoch, Kintada and Kimmochi, became celebrated for landscape painting, the former choosing Chinese scenes, the latter Japanese. Other renowned artists of the Kose school in the same epoch were Koreshige and Nobushige.

A branch of the Kose school, namely, the Takuma, is distinguished by Japanese connoisseurs, but in truth the only appreciable difference is that the Takuma masters, following the methods of the Sung painters of China, carried the decorative features of their religious paintings to a degree of unprecedented splendour and elaboration. Takuma Tamenari founded the school in the middle of the eleventh century, and his greatest work, still extant though much defaced by time, was the decoration of the walls and doors of the temple Biyōdō-in at Uji, on which occasion he chose for subjects the nine circles of the Buddhist paradise and eight effigies of Shaka. The bold and brilliant style thus inaugurated found great exponents in later ages, but can scarcely be said to have preserved its individuality after the fourteenth century.

These different schools—the Kose, the Takuma, the Kasuga, and the Tosa—have been mentioned here because their names are on the lips of every Japanese connoisseur. But, for purposes of intelligent understanding, the qualities and characteristics of the four