Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/71

66 was his personality, unique and undefinable, that made his borrowing such an impression as we feel it in fact in his work. After all, he has to be judged, in my opinion, as an artist of technique.

I do not know what picture of his the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum have, except a few reproductions in books, which impressed me as poor examples. It is not too much to say that Professor Conder's Kyosai book is the first and may be the last; there is no more fit man than he, who as Kyosai's student knew him personally during the last eight years of his life. The book contains some good specimens which belong to that period; but what I most wish to see, are the pictures he produced in his earlier age. He is one of the artists who will gain much from selection; who will ever publish a book of twenty or thirty best pieces of his life's production?