"Picture a richly endowed painter--at first only dimly conscious of his powers--as in a mystery-play he treads the consecrated stage in the sacred precincts of a temple of Tokushima or in the shadow of the cryptomerias and firs of the Hachisuka castle--a fantastic mask covering his features, other masked spectres before his eyes--surrounded by the atmosphere of the occult tradition of ancient and lofty dramatic art--while, in the depths of his soul's abysses, chained Titans would storm up to the outer world, and confused pictures of his future creations hover before his spirit, ... and we shall realize that this man, as a painter, must become a dramaturgist. "And if we summon to our vision the gorgeous stretches of Awa--its chasmy mountains with the forests rustling around them--its picturesque sea-lapped beaches--its sun-drenched groves of oak--its glowing scarlet maples--the brilliant flowers of its Spring--the evergreens of its Winter--then we shall realize that this man, as a painter, must become a colour-dreamer. "Brooding spirit that he was, he, an Edipus, approached venturously to the Sphinx of passion that peers forth from the faces of men. Uncanny powers lurked in the grotesque furrows and demoniac grimaces of his Nō-masks, but nothing little or shallow--nay, in spite of all grotesqueness, only the significant and symbolic. And then he looked down from his buskined height upon the popular actors--bombastic barn-stormers--greasy low-comedians--louts from nowhere, as the illustrious Harunobu had called them--performers who brought before their gaping audience not, as did he, august things in strangely wonderful guise, but often things far too human in strutting stage-pomp. He looked upon them, a guild not only despised but sometimes even outlawed--a guild that stood on the same plane as the idiotic profession of the wrestler,--a class whose vulgar faces could not hide their swaggering gutter-vanity and their cringing lust for applause behind even the red paint of the ferocious warrior-rôle or the corpse-coloured rice-powder used when aping women. And if we see him thus, we shall understand that this man, as a painter of actors, must eventually become a pitiless satirist." It was therefore with the colossal and tragic gestures of the Nō-dance in his soul, the distorted and monumental intensity of the Nō-masks in his eyes, and the contempt and irony of the Nō-performer for the common actor in his heart, that Sharaku, coming to Yedo, took up his terrible brush to depict the Yedo actors as he saw them. The resulting series of portraits is surely one of the supreme examples of graphic characterization and devastating contempt that the world has ever seen.