Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/63

RV 41 epochs. For all purposes of true appreciation it seems sufficient to say that the fifteenth century was the culminating period of Chinese pictorial art in Japan, and that its giant figures, Shiubun, Sesshiu, Masanobu, and Motonobu, though they stand at the head of three distinct lines of artists, drew their inspiration from the same source and set before themselves the same ideals. Motonobu's masterpieces had the special excellence of being free from the hard outlines which in Sesshiu's pictures offend against natural laws; but this superiority is partly balanced by loss of vigour and massiveness.

The immediate object of these notes being to trace the development of Japanese art itself, not the history of Japanese artists, reference is omitted to the names of several great disciples upon whom the mantle of the four renaissance masters fell, and the reader is invited to pass at once to the closing years of the sixteenth century, when a new departure was made by two leaders of the Kano school, Eitoku and Sanraku. It has been shown above that pure Chinese influence reached its first culminating point in the ninth century, when Kose no Kanaoka won immortal fame, and that his classical style continued to monopolise the field of pictorial art until the eleventh century, when Motomitsu founded the Yamato, or Japanese school, which subsequently developed decorative characteristics, and finally, in the hands of the Tosa masters, became more remarkable for rich colour harmonies and gorgeous illuminations than for any of the qualities recognised by classical canons. So, too, it is found that the rebirth of Chinese influence in the fifteenth century, which speedily reached the zenith of its glory in the hands of Sesshiu, was followed, within less