Masanobu’s son Motonobu was even more famous, and to him is due the credit of forcing the new school into public favour. Born in 1477, in his youth he wandered over the country, carrying little but his brushes, painting everything he saw, and paying his way with the results. But those lean years of poverty and study stood him in good stead. Fortune smiled at last, and he became the most popular painter of his day. Goto Yujo, the famous metal worker, adopted his designs for sword ornaments, his painted fans were chosen as ceremonial gifts to the Mikado and Shogun, and, to crown all, Mitsushigé, the head of the exclusive and aristocratic Tosa school, gave him the hand of his daughter in marriage. He died, full of years and honours, in 1559. For landscape, birds, and figure subjects he is equally famous, and as a master of the brush he is unsurpassed. In the work of the Chinese schools the quality of line, though often striking, is used in a more reticent way, entirely as a means to an end; but in the Kano school the line becomes a thing of beauty and life, almost an end in itself. The astonishing power and sweep of Motonobu’s line may be seen to perfection in the Shoriken in the British Museum.

During the sixteenth century the Kano school numbered many famous names. Yeitoku, a grandson of Motonobu, became the favourite painter of the Shogun Hideyoshi. Kaihoku Yusho was noted for his beautiful misty effects; and more famous, perhaps, than either is Kimura Sanraku. Sanraku was at first a page in the service of Hideyoshi, who, discovering his talent, sent him to study under Yeitoku. His work has all the dash and swing of the Kano style, and his colouring is rich and harmonious, while his line is almost worthy to rank with that of Motonobu. Sanraku’s adopted son Sansetsu carried on the tradition of the family, though his work has more of the restrained quality of Sesshiu and his followers than the dash of his more immediate predecessors. The British Museum has a beautiful rainy landscape by Sansetsu, slight in treatment—only some dim hills drenched in misty rain, with the suggestion of a bridge and a stream and a fisherman’s cottage—but everything, even the cottage roof, looks wet. (See frontispiece.)

In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Kano school took a new lease of life with the advent of the three brothers, grandsons of Yeitoku, Tanyu, Naonobu, and Yasunobu.

Of the three, Tanyu is the most famous, and is recognised as one of the greatest masters of the Kano school. He is distinctly a painter’s painter, and delights in what we should call fireworks. Handling his brush with careless ease he makes a smudge, a few blots, and a swirl, and behold a landscape! A very Japanese Whistler; but it marks the difference between the two publics that, while Whistler is with us still “caviare to the general,” the Japanese substitute is one of the most popular of all their painters. His two large pictures of Kwannon, however, in the British Museum, stamp him as no mere swaggerer but a great and serious artist. In the private collection of Mr Arthur Morrison are two magnificent sixfold landscape screens, which show him to rank with the first of Japanese landscape painters, and, among other unique examples of his work, a dainty little study of birds and convolvulus, touched with the utmost lightness and delicacy.