inence given to black in certain portions of the picture accords ill with nature. What came next, somewhere about 1710, from the first artists of the Torii School,—their broadsides in black and one tint, or black and two or three tints, without shadows, without perspective, of women with faces that neither Japan nor any other land has ever seen in real life,—these accord with nature equally little. But they display a tender harmony of colouring, a strength of touch, a power of composition, that elevate what at first strike a European as mere sketches to an ethereal form of art. When Hokusai and Hiroshige caught up the tradition, landscape was treated in an equally idealistic way. These colour-prints of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century—the work of the Toriis, the Katsugawas, the Utagawas, and other schools—stand alone and unrivalled, resembling nothing so much as certain beautiful butterflies of fantastic yet harmonious hue.
The old coloured broadsides (nishiki-e) were published, as their degenerate modern representatives still are, sometimes in single sheets, very often in sets of three sheets to a picture, rarely in more than three. The first coloured book (copied from a Chinese one dated 1701) seems to have been issued about 1748, and the xylographic art as a whole may be said to have reached its culminating point about 1765, under Suzuki Harunobu and Torii Kiyonaga. Soon fans and other paper articles began to be adorn ed with engravings either black or coloured. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century what were called Surimono came into fashion,—dainty little works of art to which our Christmas cards are the nearest equivalent. Those by Hokusai (1760-1849) and his pupil Hokkei are particularly esteemed.
As happens to all arts, time brought with it greater complexity and a more florid taste. Instead of the two or three blocks of an earlier day, as many as thirty were now often employed; and the colours, after 1830, grew gaudy. The introduction of cheap European pigments, the troubles that attended the opening of the country, and the influence of debased European specimens
