SWORD-FURNITURE
The use of kwanto-gata motives are not confined to Nagasaki experts. Gotō Kiyonori, who worked in Yedo contemporaneously with Jakushi, became celebrated for similar carving, and examples of it are not infrequently found among the productions of inferior experts. These kwanto-tsuba, and the mogarashi tsuba already described, are, perhaps, the least interesting of all the ko-dogu.
The artists thus far noticed as belonging to the eighteenth century were all representatives of families established at an earlier date. Families which not only gave lustre to the century but also had their origin in it, are the Hamano, the Omori, the Iwamoto, and the Okamoto. These houses produced experts who may be said to have carried the art to its zenith.
The Hamano family of Yedo first came into note in the days of Masayori (1730), a pupil of the great Nara Toshihisa. Masayori is always known as Shōzui, the alternative pronunciation of the ideographs forming his name. He had many art titles—Otsuriuken, Miboku Rifūdo, etc. He worked chiefly in shakudo, but often in iron, not making any departure from the Nara style, but using his chisels with extraordinary strength yet at no sacrifice of grace and delicacy. The Sōken Kishō says that the lines of his carving are like "the storm of a tiger's roar or the wind of a dragon's rush through the clouds." It may be truly said of the Hamano family that it did not give one inferior artist to Japan. Shōzui himself was probably the greatest, but his pupils Moriyuki and Noriyori, and his successors Masanobu (1780) and Norinobu (1790) rank almost as his peers.[1] The Hamano
- ↑ See Appendix, note 47.
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