In the first half of the nineteenth century there grew into importance in the city of Osaka a group of designers who constituted an exception to the statement made earlier in this book--that the art of colour-printing was exclusively a Yedo art. Hokusai is known to have visited Osaka in 1818; and possibly it was his influence that encouraged the movement. At any rate, a large number of the Osaka group were pupils of Hokusai or followers of his manner. The school thus entered into real activity at a date when the art was far gone in its decline; and its designs produced no arresting effect. Most of the work of these men is crude. Yet when we look at the products of the second quarter of the century in Yedo, we may very possibly feel that the Osaka output was at least no worse. It included chiefly theatrical portraits, all done with a peculiar hardness of line and cold brilliance of colour, and printed as a rule very skilfully. These by no means approach the works of Shunsho, Shunyei, and Sharaku, after which they were obviously patterned, nor even the works of Toyokuni; but the hard treatment so characteristic of them gives a certain dignity of effect which Kunisada's flowing and formless earthquakes of draperies generally lack. The school does not call for elaborate treatment; the following men may be mentioned as among the best known: HOKUSHU, HASEGAWA SADANOBU, SADAKAGE, KAGETOSHI, SADAFUSA, SADATORA, SADAMASA, SADAMASU, SADAHIRO, SADAYOSHI, ASHIKUNI, ASHIYUKI, HIROSADA, SHUNSHI, HORAI SHUNSHO II, HOKUMIO, HANZAN, YOSHIIKU, and RANKO. Others will be mentioned later as pupils of Hokusai or as landscape-painters. THE RENAISSANCE OF LANDSCAPE. Like a beautiful island in the midst of a sea of wrecks, the landscape prints of the first half of the nineteenth century stand apart from the general debasement of print-designing. The great days of the figure-print were over; but now, into an art filled with the second-rate followers of Utamaro and Toyokuni, came the fresh and brilliant landscape genius of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Their work did not share in the general decline; it must be regarded as a new shoot sent up by the roots of a tree whose main trunk had already fallen into irreparable decay. Landscape-prints were not a new thing; Utamaro and Toyohiro had already produced fine work of this nature, and interesting examples are to be found as we look backward through the work of Toyoharu, Shigemasa, Kiyonobu, and Masanobu--back, in fact, almost to the beginning of the art. But these earlier landscapes were, upon the whole, of subordinate importance; beside the figure-prints of the earlier masters, they seem crude and rudimentary. Previous to Hokusai and Hiroshige, they were chiefly of topographical, not of æsthetic, intention and interest. In the nineteenth century their importance became paramount.