In vain Hiroshige fought, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, against introduction of cheap and inferior pigments, which were taking the place of the native dyes—Nature’s gifts, distilled by her artist children. Reds, yellows, blues and greens, intense and crude, were now imported, and Western commercialism sapped the virtue of the sincere and devoted artists and artisans of the Orient. In describing the effect of colour in one of the Nikko temples, W. B. Van Ingen throws a searchlight upon the chemical secrets of this splendour, which he tells us, if asked to describe in one word, that word would be “golden.” “These colours,” he says, “are not imitations of colours. If vermilion is used, it is cinnabar and not commercialized vermilion which is employed, nor is something substituted for cobalt because it is cheaper and will ‘do just as well.’ Each colour is used because it is beautiful and frank as a colour, not because some other colour is beautiful. If lacquer is the best medium to display the beauty of the pigment, lacquer is used, and if water is better, lacquer is discarded, and if these colours are not imitations of colours, neither are they suggestions of colours. Pink is not used for red; if it is used at all, it is used for its own beauty, and feeble bluish washes are not made to do service for blue. The Oriental has not yet learned the doctrine of substitution; he knows that substitution is transformation.” The secrets of colouring of the early prints, the joy of Parisian studios and which inspired Whistler, are lost. The delicious greens of old mosses, the pale rose tints, the veinings and marblings, the iridescent tints of ocean shells, the luminous colours of the anemone, the _bleus malades des mauves_—that divine violet, a benison of the palette handed down by those old Buddhist monks, the earliest painters of India and China.