Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/446

 ments of dissected satyrs, busts of nymphs or halves of horses were considered graceful excrescences for the adornment of an amphora or a pithos. This Makuzu faience, produced by the now justly celebrated Miyagawa Shōzan of Ota (near Yokohama), survives in the form of vases and pots having birds, reptiles, flowers, crustacea, and so forth, plastered over the surface; specimens that disgrace the period of their manufacture and represent probably the worst aberration of Japanese keramic conception.

A production so degraded as the early Makuzu faience could not possibly have long vogue. Miyagawa soon began to cast about for a better inspiration, and found it in the monochromes and polychromes of the Chinese Kang-hsi and Yung-cheng kilns. The extraordinary value attaching to the incomparable red glazes of China, not only in the country of their provenance, but also in the United States of America, where collectors showed a fine instinct in this matter, seems to have suggested to Miyagawa the idea of imitation. He took for model the rich and delicate "liquid-dawn" monochrome, and succeeded in producing, not indeed a rival of that grand ware, but at any rate some specimens of considerable merit. Thenceforth his example was largely followed, and it may now be said that the tendency of many of the best Japanese keramists is to copy Chinese chefs d'œuvre. To find them thus renewing their keramic reputation by reverting to Chinese models, is not only another tribute to the perennial supremacy of Chinese porcelains, but also a fresh illustration of the eclectic genius of Japanese art. All the products of this new effort are porcelains proper. It is not intended to suggest that beautiful faience has ceased to be a Japa-