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48 eminence was Kose-no-Kanaoka, a Court noble who flourished from about A.D. 850 to 880, but scarcely any of whose works remain. That the art of painting, especially on screens, was assiduously cultivated at the Japanese Court during the ninth and tenth centuries, is proved by numerous references in literature. But it was not till about the year 1000 that the Yamato Ryū (lit. "Japanese School"), the first concerning which we have much positive knowledge, was established by an artist named Motomitsu. This school contained within itself the seed of most of the peculiarities that have characterised Japanese art ever since, with its neglect of perspective, its impossible mountains, its quaint dissection of roofless interiors, its spirited burlesques of solemn processions, wherein frogs, insects, or hobgoblins take the place of men. In the thirteenth century this school assumed the name of the Tosa Ryū, and confined itself thenceforward more and more to classical subjects. Its former humorous strain had been caught as early, as the twelfth century by Toba Sōjō, a rollicking priest, who, about A.D. 1160, distinguished himself by drawings coarse in both senses of the word, but full of verve and drollery. These are the so-called Toba-e. Toba Sōjō founded a school. To found a school was de rigueur in Old Japan, where originality was so little understood that it was supposed that any eminent man's descendants or pupils, to the twentieth generation, ought to be able to do the same sort of work as their ancestor had done. But none of the jovial abbot's followers are worthy of mention alongside of him.

The fifteenth century witnessed a powerful renaissance of Chinese influence, and was the most glorious period of Japanese painting. It is a strange coincidence that Italian painting should then also have been at its zenith. But it is apparently a coincidence only, there being no fact to warrant us in assuming any influence of the one on the other. The most famous names are those of the Buddhist priests Chō Densu and Jōsetsu. Chō Densu, the Fra Angelico of Japan, restricted himself to religious subjects, while Jōsetsu painted landscapes, figures, flowers, and