Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/41

Rh in connection with Buddhist pictures only are Kanaoka, Hirotaka, and Meicho (commonly called Cho Densu). But the reader must always remember that Japan’s best artists in all ages contributed their quota to the pictorial treasures of the temples, and that not until after the twelfth century did the secular picture rise to a place of at least equal importance with the sacred.

The divergence of the Japanese secular artist’s brush from Chinese lines—spoken of above as having commenced simultaneously with a political break between the two empires at the beginning of the tenth century—gradually became so marked that, a hundred years later, the public recognised the existence of a native school, and called it the Yamato Riu, or Wa-gwa Riu (synonyms for “Japanese style”). The reputed founder of the School was Kasuga Motomitsu, but the truth is that, like Kanaoka, his genius represented, not