Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/212

 from cold grey to light buff; an excellent change, since the soft, creamy richness of the latter furnished a charming ground for the brilliant enamels applied to it.

After Ninsei the greatest name connected with the Awata factory is that of Ogata Sansei, whose artist name was Kenzan. Ogata was born at Narutaki-mura, in the suburbs of Kyōtō, in the year 1660; that is to say, just at the time when the methods introduced by Ninsei had fairly won their way to public favour. He was the second son of Ogata Sōken, and his younger brother was the celebrated painter Kōrin. Sansei, who appears to have been called also Shinsei and Shinsaburo, was himself a painter of considerable promise, but his proclivities fortunately lay in the direction of keramics. After he had studied literature and poesy under the well-remembered Hirosawa Nagayoshi, and the mysteries of the Cha-no-Yu under Zuiru Sōsa,—whom the men of the next generation elevated into a semi-divinity under the title of Nichiren Sōsa,—he spent a short time in the practice of his father's favourite art, and his pictures are said to have given earnest of great talent. That he preferred to devote his brush to the ornamentation of faience was partly, perhaps, because the designs furnished for that purpose by Tanyū and Eishin had attracted so much attention, and partly because his brother Kōrin, in whom he must have recognised a greater artist than himself, had already a taste for lacquer decoration. At first he appears to have applied himself diligently to the study of technical processes, taking for his instructors the potters of Raku, Seto, and Zeze. Very soon, however, he developed an original style, of which the chief charac-