About 1775 arose a legitimate successor to the school of Torii in the adopted son of Kiyomitsu, Kiyonaga. He discarded the theatrical tradition of his school, but the boldness of his drawing was foreign to the style of Harunobu. “His brush had a superhuman power and swing.” He rivalled the three great masters, Koriusai, Shigemasa, founder of Kitao, and Toyoharu of Utagawa, and the masters of Ukiyo-ye, forsaking their individual predilections, flocked to his studio. The simplicity and dignity of the early Italian masters, sought after and adored by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, their noble lines and contours, are again realized in the panels of Kiyonaga. Professor Fenollosa said that “classic” is the instinctive term to apply to Kiyonaga, and that his figures at their best may be placed side by side with Greek vase painting. Ideally beautiful is the fall of his drapery, determining the lines of the figure in the fewest possible folds. In indoor scenes he almost rivalled Harunobu, but he loved best to paint in the open air. In imagination we see Kiyonaga, the lover of beauty, gazing at the wealth of lotus blooms which fill the moats of feudal Yedo, and in the crucible of his fancy transmuting them into the forms of women. The lotus, of all flowers, has the deepest art significance, and is the oldest motive. The author of “Greek Lines,” Henry Van Brunt, said: “The lotus perpetually occurs in oriental mythology as the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power of nature. The Hindu and the Egyptian instinctively elevated it to the highest and most cherished place in their Pantheons.” It is the flower of religion, of beauty, and of love. From the ocean the Hindu Aphrodite, Lachsmi, ascended. Isis in Egypt reigned, crowned by the lotus, and there the tender, flowing lines became sublime, monumental, fitted to symbolize death and eternal repose. In Japan its joyous curves represent life, immortality, and, delicately sensuous, they conjure up visions of ideal beauty. The lotus, sweetly blooming before the artist’s eye, expanded into a vision of fair women, whose lissom forms he clothed with swirls of drapery. And the women of Japan, enamoured of these enchanting poses, endeavoured to assume the curves of Kiyonaga, sheathing their delicate limbs in silken draperies, and simulating in their enchanting slenderness the stems of flowers—or, to borrow a beautiful simile from Lafcadio Hearn, “looking like a beautiful silver moth robed in the folding of its own wings.” It is said that every Japanese actor-print was a potential poster, and, alas! the fashion-plate is endeavouring to mold itself upon the most exaggerated type of the degenerate offspring of the genius of the Torii School.