And our masters and instructors in art more and more recognize the value of initial brush-work. The following excerpt from Walter Crane, in _Line and Form_, might serve as a preface to a work on Hokusai or Hiroshige: “The practice of forming letters with the brush afforded a very good preliminary practice to a student of line and form. An important attribute of line is its power of expressing or suggesting movement. Undulating lines always suggest action and unrest or the resistance of force of some kind. The firm-set yet soft feathers of a bird must be rendered by a different touch from the shining scales of a fish. The hair and horns of animals, delicate human features, flowers, the sinuous lines of drapery, or the massive folds of heavy robes, all demand from the draughtsman in line different kinds of suggestive expression.” We are told that Hiroshige began his career by making pictures in coloured sands on an adhesive background, to amuse the public, and perhaps this artistic juggling helped him later in arranging his schemes of colour, for the limitations of the block demanded almost equal simplicity in composition. The impressions of Lake Biwa, one of Hiroshige’s finest series of views, serve as a beautiful illustration of the almost exclusive use of line in bringing out the salient characteristics of the landscape. His sweeping brush shows us volcanic mountains, encircling the lake, like rocky billows, torn and jagged, for legend says that as the peerless mountain Fuji-san rose in one night, so the ground sank, and the space was filled by the beautiful lake named from its resemblance in form to the Japanese lute. The trees which fringe the shore, black and misty, upon close inspection resolve themselves into a network of criss-cross lines and blotches. The sampans’ sails, the waves, the rushes on the shore, the roofs of the village nestling beneath the cliffs, are all adroitly rendered by horizontal lines and skillful zigzags. The rest of the composition is a wash of shaded blues and grays, fading towards the horizon into smoky violets. Biwa, the beautiful, suggestive of mystery, the four-stringed lute gives thee her name. Through the music of thy rippling eddies do sighs well up in thee, the murmur of the lost? A pall of darkness hovers over thee, pierced by a gleam of sunshine, beckoning like a lover’s hand. Much diversity of opinion exists with regard to the identity of the artist, or artists, who designed the prints signed Hiroshige. The latest research, however, justifies the assertion that there was but one landscape painter, Hiroshige the Great.