The actual process of wood-cutting seems a simple art, but a close study of the making of prints will show the consummate skill required to produce them. The artist’s design was transferred by tracing paper, then pasted on to the face of the wood block, and the white space hollowed out with a knife and small gouges. After the block had been inked, a sheet of damp paper was laid upon it, and the back of the paper was then rubbed with a flat rubber till the impression was uniformly transferred. Where more than one block was employed, as in colour-printing, the subsequent impressions were registered by marks made at the corners of the paper. The colouring matter laid upon these early blocks was extracted by mysterious processes from sources unknown to the Western world, which, alas! by supplying the Eastern market with cheap pigments, led to the deterioration of art in this essential particular. From 1765 to 1780 the school of Ukiyo-ye was dominated by four great artists and creators of separate styles: Harunobu, succeeded by Koriusai, taking for motive the subjects of Shunsui; Shunsho of Katsukawa (changed by Shunsui from its former title of Miyagawa), upon whose shoulders had fallen the mantle of the Torii; Shigemasa, working upon Shunsho’s lines, but breaking into a rival academy, the Kitao; Toyoharu, pupil of old Torii Toyonobu, founder of the school of Utagawa, whose most illustrious pupil was Toyokuni, the doll-maker, and brother of Toyohiro, Hiroshige’s master. (Kunisada, noted for his backgrounds, succeeded Toyokuni, and after the death of his master signed himself Toyokuni the Second.) Shunsho is considered one of the greatest artists of Japan, both as an inventor and powerful colourist. M. Louis Gonse says: “All the collections of coloured prints which are today the delight of the tea-houses; all the fine compositions showing magnificent landscapes and sumptuous interiors; all those figures of actors with heroic gestures and impassive faces behind the grinning masks, and with costumes striking and superb,—came originally from the atelier of Katsukawa Shunsho, who had for a time the monopoly of them.” While the Torii artists were beguiling the Yedo populace with theatrical portraiture, and aiding the growing tendency toward cosmopolitanism by issuing printed albums, books of travel and encyclopedias, art was also expanding at the ancient capital, Kyoto. Sukenobu, the prolific artist, was bringing out beautifully illustrated books, and Okio, from sketching on the earth with bamboo sticks, while following his father and mother to their work in the fields, had risen to be the great founder of the Maruyama school of painting, and the Shijo or naturalistic school was named from the street in which was the studio of the master.