SWORD-FURNITURE
chika combined the Yokoya style with their own, and carved figures, plants, flowers, birds, and landscapes with extraordinary delicacy and force. Yasuchika is sometimes called the "Kōrin" of carvers, his qualities of boldness, directness, and originality being not less marked than those of the great painter Ogata Kōrin. His works as well as those of Toshihisa have been largely imitated, but, as a Japanese connoisseur of the eighteenth century justly says, the imitations differ from the originals as widely as glass differs from diamond. The difference may be illustrated by saying that prior to the Meiji era a good sword-guard by one of the "Three Pictures" sold for the equivalent of from two hundred to four hundred yen, whereas an imitation, however skilful, was appraised at about as many sen.[1] It should be noted that a great deal of confusion exists between Toshihisa, and his teacher Toshinga. That is partly due to the fact that the second ideograph of the former's name may be read naga, but also to the fact that Toshinaga, though he has received less recognition than Toshihisa, can scarcely be called an inferior artist, and that, owing to the number of his pupils, he exercised a lasting influence on the fame of the family. Toshinaga's art name was Chikan. No less than forty-four experts of the Nara school worked between the beginning of the seventeenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, though only six of them were actual representatives of the family.
The century was remarkable for a great development of the art of chiselling à jour. That kind of decoration, as already shown, represented almost the only style of the early forgers of sword-guards, and
- ↑ See Appendix, note 39.
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