To understand the influences which sapped the self-control of the gay and beauty-loving Utamaro, we have only to glance at the text by Jipensha Ikkou of “The Annuary of the Green Houses,” two volumes of prints in colour, so marvellously beautiful that they caused the artist to be recognized as, in a sense, the official painter of the Yoshiwara. The writer thus sums up the fatal fascination of the inmates, the courtesans of highest rank, who alone were depicted by Utamaro. “The daughters of the Yoshiwara are brought up like princesses. From infancy they are given the most finished education” (from the Japanese standpoint, be it observed). “They are taught reading, writing, art, music, _le thé_, _le parfum_” (in the game of scents, the art is to guess by inhaling the odour of burning perfumes the secret of their composition). “Their entourage is that of princesses, brought up in the seclusion of the palace. Coming from all parts of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun,’ they must discard their individual patois and learn to speak the archaic tongue, slightly modified, the poetical, the noble language of the court from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.” In the home of the celebrated Tsutaya Juzabro, who edited the most beautiful books of the time, in his early impressionable youth lived Utamaro, within a stone’s throw of the great gate leading to the Yoshiwara. By day he devoted himself to his art, by night he surrendered himself to the fatal enchantment of that brilliant “Underworld,” until, like Merlin, ensnared by Vivian, with the charm of “woven paces and waving hands,” his art sapped by excesses, he became “lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.” Let us, forgetting this sad sequel, glance at the works which testify to the life of high artistic endeavour led by Utamaro in the early part of his career. In the preface to the “Yehon Moushi Yerabi” (Chosen Insects), the master of Utamaro, Toriyama Sekiyen, throws so charming a sidelight upon the youth of the artist, that the temptation to quote is irresistible. The value of these Japanese prefaces to the world, to workers in every field, is incalculable. At the outset of his work, M. de Goncourt alludes to the well-known preface of Hokusai in the “Fugaku Hiak’kei,” and doubtless fortified himself by the stimulating example of the old master, when undertaking at the age of seventy the great task of presenting to the Western world, under the title of “L’Art Japonais,” a history of five noted painters, besides that of other artists in bronze and lacquer, pottery and iron—artists in a land where the terms artist and artisan are interchangeable, the only country where art industrial almost always touches grand art.