"Never," says Gonse, "has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure, for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai's capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya. Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones." After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the æsthetic character of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness, unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people. Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs,