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Letter #8

7

of a few of Hogai's, and recent one by Hogai's pupil, no such lofty figure creation has been reached in Japan for four hundred years. Tanyu does not reach that height in such subjects. We must go back as far as Sesshu, Sotan and Kano Masanobu. When this was first publicly shown, in our art club exhibition of 1886, there was such a furor over it that the Emperor asked to borrow it and kept it several months. Perhaps these details may interest you.

Gaho's Daruma in contemplation. Daruma was the Indian founder of the Zen sect in China, and his philosophy did much to stimulate the great Chinese schools of landscape art and poetry. He has been painted by all the great masters, but perhaps never with such a sweet human earnestness. Next to the "Kwanzan and Jittoku" it is perhaps Gaho's ripest figure piece. It dates from about 1885.

Besides these I send you three old pieces that have turned up in my boxes.

Nichikawa Sukenobu's Shinto priestess showing her paraphernalia to street girls and children. Sukenobu, you may remember, comes as the Kioto analogue in Ukiyo-ye of Choshun and Okumura Masanobu in Yedo. This, on paper, is the strongest and broadest piece I have ever seen by him, and was given by me to the same kiojiya to mount in 1890 with the intention of making it my one perfect specimen of Sukenobu in My Ukiyo-ye collection. Therefore it properly belongs with those of mine which you have already bought.

Hanabusa Itcho's two bird pieces. This artist was first a pupil of Yasunobu of the Kano school, and in it he was the greatest master of the 17th century after Tanyu, Maonobu and Tsunenobu. These are a pair, still unmounted, designed for a screen. They are fine specimens. Their perfect preservation enables us to see in them just what his contemporaries saw two hundred years ago. As you know, Itcho afterward became one of the great Ukiyo-yeshi. These are samples of his early work, contemporary with Tanyu. Yamanaka could have them finely mounted at slight expense.

Toriyama Sekiyen's early picture of a girl. I picked this up a year ago in Japan, as a piece of much historical value.  Sekiyen [[strikethrough]] yen is known only by his late paintings, and as the teacher of Uta- [[/strikethrough]]