Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/71

RV 49 by superposition of primary, so that, while still using only three blocks, red, blue, yellow, purple, and green were obtained, which, with the black and white of the print, gave a scheme of seven colours. At this point (about 1760) Suzuki Harunobu appeared. By many connoisseurs he is counted the greatest master of nishiki-ye, and the title rests on at least three solid foundations, namely, the delicacy of his line drawing, the delightful softness and music of his colours, and the atmosphere of fresh innocence with which he envelops his female figures. But Harunobu's conceptions of life and its graces recall the declining day of Heian civilisation, when "cloud gallants" painted their eyebrows, powdered their faces, and aped femininity. His work is never robust; his men are scarcely distinguishable from women; he deforms hands and feet to make them slender, and he knows only one type of female beauty which he produces and reproduces unceasingly. Nevertheless to him undoubtedly belongs the credit of having inaugurated a new and almost final departure in Japanese chromo-xylography. He abandoned the drawing of actors to which his contemporaries had hitherto confined themselves,—a limitation which, in turn, confined their public to the lower middle classes, since the theatre and everything appertaining to it belonged essentially to vulgar life,—and he set himself to design chromo-xylographic pictures of ladies and gentlemen amid the luxuries of their lives and the refinements of their pastimes. Further, he included backgrounds in his scheme of colours; multiplied the number of blocks so as to produce a variety of tints, strong, light, and soft; changed the shape of the