Kitao Masayoshi, who frequently signed himself Keisai or Shosin, was a curious and original designer, who lived from 1761 to 1824. Though a pupil of Shigemasa, he appears to have drawn a large part of his inspiration from a source outside the Ukioye movement--the Kano School of painting, in which the classical traditions still flourished. In his main period, contemporaneous with Kiyonaga, his work was little influenced by the great master. His designs are marked chiefly by the vividness of his observation of flowers, animals, and landscape, and by his technical skill in recording them. His books of sketches are his best-known works--drawings in a manner new to wood-engraving; he seldom employs any key-block, but leaves the main body of his colour in broad impressionistic sweeps of the brush without definite boundary. He approached Nature somewhat as did Hokusai in later days, with a sharp perception and infinite interest. His work lies aside from the main current of Ukioye history--an interesting backwater that comes more properly within the region of classical painting than within that of prints. [Illustration: KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO. Size 15½ × 22. Signed _Masanobu ga_. Spaulding Collection. _Plate 34._] Single-sheet prints by Masayoshi are very rare. His book-sheets are somewhat more frequently met with. VI THE FOURTH PERIOD: THE DECADENCE FROM THE RETIREMENT OF KIYONAGA TO THE DEATH OF UTAMARO (1790-1806) CHAPTER VI THE FOURTH PERIOD: THE DECADENCE FROM THE RETIREMENT OF KIYONAGA TO THE DEATH OF UTAMARO (1790-1806) The change that confronts us as we turn from the period of Kiyonaga to that of Utamaro, Yeishi, and Toyokuni is one whose significance is not at first sight wholly clear. We find the sound and classic figures of Kiyonaga gradually replaced by new and fascinating types--slender drooping bodies, wonderfully piled coiffures, elaborately brocaded robes; and the virile drawing of the earlier master gives way to the sinuous curves and arresting plasticity of the new designers. The favourite types of this time are almost as unreal as those of the Primitives, but they convey a totally different feeling; on the one hand, in their curious perverted way, they are far more realistic than the Primitives ever dreamed of being; and on the other hand, they seem the products of minds weary of reality, who turn to the phantasies of the not wholly normal spirit for their ideals and their consolations. It must not be supposed, however, that the transition to this style of the Decadence was a sudden one. The painters who had most perfectly assimilated the style of Kiyonaga were the very ones who, in this period, turned to the depiction of figures in which every line betrays the weariness of the hour and its craving for novelty. The apex of creative energy in this art had been reached and the inevitable decline was under way.