Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/106

 porcelain for his model, and that he was followed by Adriaen Pynacker and other artists, of whose copies of the blue-red-and-gold "Old Japan" it is related that "their lightness was astonishing, their éclât surprising, and that in fidelity of imitation they were even better calculated to deceive the amateur than the works of Aelbregt de Keizer." Meanwhile Wagenaar, the head of the Dutch factory at Deshima, and his successors were impressing their own ideas of European taste upon the potters of Arita; and these latter, obedient to the whims of their largest customer, were manufacturing for export pieces which Japanese connoisseurs would have rejected with disdain. Then, as years went by, the shrewd traders of Deshima, beginning to understand the chaste taste of the Japanese generally and the archaic fancies of the tea-clubs in particular, imported specimens of Delft faience worthy to vie with the most rustic, homely ware of the Seto and Karatsu factories. Whether these specimens were specially manufactured for the Japanese market, or whether they were merely chosen from among the coarsest productions of the Delft workshops, their novelty and unpretending character endeared them at once to the devotees of the Cha-no-Yu, and a new but limited field of profit was opened to the Dutchmen in Deshima. Finally, nearly a hundred years later, the potters of Kyōtō, as will be shown by and by, undertook to imitate the faience of Delft, and delighted to copy pieces as far as possible removed from the fashions of their own art.

It may be added here, that of the porcelain trade between the Dutch and the Japanese subsequent to the seventeenth century few records are known to exist. Kaempfer says that during the latter half of that century