great lacquer artists. There have,
of course, been many hundreds, and indeed thousands, in the past
centuries whose work was superb, but the twenty-eight are deemed to
be the immortals of this particular art. One of these great men,
Ogawa Ritsuo, is famous for the number and variety of the
materials--mother-of-pearl, coral, tortoise-shell, &c. &c., he used
in his work. A profuse richness is its chief characteristic. One of
his pupils imitated in his work various materials--pottery and
wood-carving, and bronzes. The last famous artist in lacquer,
Watanobe Tosu, died about thirty years ago. Whether he is destined
to have a successor or successors remains to be seen. These lacquer
artists, as I have indicated, worked not for lucre, but for love.
Attached to some Daimios household, they devoted their lives, their
energies, their imagination, their artistic instincts to the
devising of splendid work and the making of beautiful, ingenious,
absolutely artistic and, at the same time, entirely useful articles.

It is impossible within the space at my disposal to deal in detail
with the large variety of lacquer work produced in Japan with the
various kinds of lacquer, or with what I may term the artistic
idiosyncrasies of Japanese lacquer work. One can now hardly believe
that until the opening up of Japan half a century or so ago, few
specimens of lacquer found their way to Europe, although Japanese
porcelain had been largely imported and was highly prized. Even at
the present time I do not think that the artistic beauties of Japanese
lacquer work have been appreciated in this country to anything like
the extent they deserve to be. I have heard people remark, for
example, that they failed to understand the perpetual reproduction of
the great snow-covered mountain Fusi-Yama in Japanese designs, while
they could see nothing in these storks, bewildering landscapes, and
grotesque figures. Perhaps the best explanation of the constant
appearance of Fusi-Yama in all Japanese work is that which De
Fonblanque gives. He says: "If there is one sentiment universal
amongst all Japanese, it is a deep and earnest reverence for their
sacred mountain. It is their ideal of the beautiful in nature, and
they never tire of admiring, glorifying, and reproducing it. It is
painted, embossed, carved, engraved, modelled in all their wares. The
mass of the people regard it not only as the shrine of their dearest
gods, but the certain panacea for their wor