ck alone were enormous. Kiyosai told me that when he
was very young he was puzzled by the exceedingly rich quality of black
in one of his master's pictures. It was a deep, velvety, luminous black,
and young Kiyosai struggled for weeks and weeks to match it, but in
vain. He came to the conclusion that there must be some work going on at
the back of the picture, and at last one night he became so desperate
that, stealing into his master's room while he lay asleep, he soaked off
the picture which had been pasted on to a board, and looked at the back
of it. One glance was enough, and little Kiyosai, with a throb of
pleasure, hastily pasted the picture together again and stole away to
experiment all that night on silk and on paper, "painting black both on
the front and on the back."

I inquired of Kiyosai if he had ever painted in oils, and he assured me
that he had not; but a few days later Captain Brinkley showed me a
little picture painted in lacquer by Kiyosai which, in my opinion,
rivalled for brilliancy any oil picture that has ever been painted, or
has still to be painted. The surface was as brilliant as glass; yet the
picture had a depth which no ordinary oil pigment could hope to reach,
while its deep luminous shadows would put to shame the finest of Van
Eyck's pictures.

An English friend of mine resident in Japan once told me a story of
Kiyosai which struck me as being typical of that great master. A friend
of his had prepared four magnificent sliding panels covered with the
finest silk, and had given them to the painter with the request that he
would execute some of his masterpieces on them for him. For eight or
nine years Kiyosai had kept those panels, and they still remained bare;
but great masters are always erratic, and the would-be purchaser never
gave up hope. One day, however, he burst in upon my friend with the
terrible intelligence that Kiyosai was dead drunk and had ruined his
panels. "He's smashing away at them on the floor, and he is simply
crawling over them," he said in a towering rage. My friend agreed to go
round with him to Kiyosai's house to try if possible to stop the
outrage. When they arrived they found the master in a high state of
fever, and looking more like a wild animal than a human being, with his
tusk-like teeth and his poor pitted face, sweeping and hacking about all
over the silken panels. As they entered, Kiyosai left the room, leaving
behind him the panels scattered irregularly ov