EARLY WARES
ing it. While it did last, however, he turned out very beautiful specimens. They were not distinguished by delicacy. Solidity was chiefly required in pieces suited to the demand of the time,—tea-jars, water-vessels, censers, and cups for the ceremony of the mat-cha. The great beauties of his ware were in the glaze and the colour. The former was of extreme softness and lustre, while the latter was a blue of the finest tone and brilliancy. Many specimens of his porcelain now extant exhibit a variety of the well-known Hawthorn pattern design, and it may be said that his decorations show the first unmistakable traces of the "Natural Style" as applied to Japanese keramics. Hardly, indeed, could he have escaped the influence of the impulse his country's pictorial art had just received at the hands of Sesshiu, Shūbun, and Kano Motonobu, whose professed masters were "mountains, rivers, flowers, and trees." Shonzui probably fell in with the mood of the times, which preferred medallions with birds and flowers to cunning diapers, and plum-blossoms or pine branches to formal scrolls. He did not always avoid Chinese designs. Conventional children, entangled among endless arabesques, figure not infrequently on his productions. But the distinguishing characteristic of his decoration is floral, and though there are no sufficient grounds for accrediting him with more than a modification of the fashions he saw at the potteries on the Po-yang Lake, it must at least be admitted that his modification was an improvement.
There can be no doubt that Shonzui obtained and brought back from China some of the celebrated Mohammedan blue which was so greatly prized and so jealously guarded in the Middle Kingdom. It is
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