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Letter #8

6

under the new influence. The picture sent to you has had a double bit of strange fortune, in that, after being rescued from its several years of Paris, it was left in Japan by me when I returned to America in 1890, in the hands of a kiojiya, or mounter, whose mother, after her son's early death in that year, carried it and some other things off into the mountains of Shinano, where they were gradually pawned to a man from whom I was not able to rescue them until the summer of 1901. That is why its somewhat mean mounting remains unchanged from its Paris state. 

Hogai's landscape, of Chinese scenery in snow. This was the first large picture he painted for me, in 1883, after he had come into my employ and influence. It is much more carefully and delicately finished than anything he had done for years. It is unlike any old Chinese or Japanese work, and really shows the full blossoming of a fifth period of the Kano school, one which stands more nearly shoulder to shoulder with the great Chinese Sung landscape of Bayen and Kakei than with any Japanese work even of Sesshu. No such lordly pine trees exist outside of the great Sung masters. Mark, too, the beautiful color of the ink, and how absolutely the form of each brush-stroke varies to express different things. This piece [[strikethrough]]too[[/strikethrough]] was rescued from the same pawnbroker, and the line at the top in pencil, (which you can easily rub out), shows the point to which I had marked it for the kiojiya to cut down in remounting in 1890. I had no time to do any remounting in Japan last year. But Yamanaka can easily have it remounted for you if you care for that.

Gaho's Kwanzan and Jittoku. This is undoubtedly the ripest figure piece ever executed by Gaho. It dates from the days of my first influence toward complete realization of these artists' conceptions in the art club, about 1884. The subject is two old servant-priests of the Zen sect in China, who were historical characters concerned with the first movement towards great landscape painting and poetry, sometime before the Tang. The style rises almost as high as Ganki and the great masters of Sung. It is as much Sungish in tendency as Hogai's Creation is Tangish. It is exact to say that, with the excep-

[[strikethrough]]tion of a few of Hogai's and one recent one by Hogai's pupil, Kwan-[[/strikethrough]]