Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/55

Rh still content with hand-coloured engravings. No sufficient explanation has ever been offered of the fact that the Japanese were so slow to borrow from their neighbours in this field. Probably the truth is that the Chinese chromo-xylograph never appealed to Japanese taste, and never deserved to appeal to it. At all events, the Chinese understood colour-printing early in the seventeenth century, whereas the Japanese did not begin to practise it until nearly the middle of the eighteenth. Their first essays were simple, the colours used being only two, red and green. The artists whose names were connected with this innovation are Torii Kiyonobu and Torii Kiyomasu, followed immediately by Okamura Masanobu, then an old man, and by Torii Kiyohiro, Torii Kiyomitsu and Torii Kiyoshige. These prints received the name of beni-ye (vermilion pictures), in consequence of the red predominating in the scheme of colour. Many of them are admirable examples of skilful massing, disposing and contrasting of colours. The artists evidently appreciated at its full value the technical superiority of colour-printing over hand painting, namely the steady, even tints and the absence of bewildering gradations of tone that wood blocks give. The next step was from the “vermilion picture” to the print of three, or even four, colours. Some ten or twelve years had elapsed before the change took place, and during that time the artists had fully mastered the basic principles of colour composition for such purposes, and had learned the subtleties of balance and harmony. Torii Kyomitsu now produced beautiful prints, in which secondary colours were developed 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,