The individual who responded to this need is today looked upon as the finest Japanese artist of all time. Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) was a pupil of Shubun and very nearly the contemporary of Sotan. Painting out of a profound sense of the spirit of Zen, Sesshu was able to dismantle the components of Sung landscapes and reassemble them into an individual statement of Zen philosophy. It is thought that he became a Zen priest early in life and spent his formative years in an obscure rural village on the Inland Sea. However, records show that at the age of thirty- seven he was a priest in a reasonably high position at Shokoku-ji, under the patronage of Yoshimasa, and a member of the academy presided over by Shubun. He apparently studied under Shubun until shortly before the Onin War, when he left Kyoto for a city on the southwestern coast and soon was on his way to China aboard a trading vessel. Traveling as a Zen priest and a painter of some reputation, Sesshu was immediately welcomed by the Ch'an centers of painting on the mainland and by the Ming court in Peking. Although he was able to see and study many Sung paintings not available in the Kyoto Ashikaga collection, he was disappointed in the Ming artists he encountered and returned to Japan declaring he had found no worthy teacher in China except her streams and mountains. He also pronounced Josetsu and Shubun the equals of any Chinese painters he had met--probably the first time in history such a statement could have gone unchallenged. He never again returned to Kyoto, but established a studio in a western seaside village, where he received the mighty and passed his years in painting, Zen meditation, and pilgrimages to temples and monasteries. According to the traditional account, he declined an opportunity to become Sotan's successor as head of the Kyoto academy, recommending that the post be given to Kano Masanobu (1434-1530), who did in fact assume a position as official painter to the shogun in the 1480s. It later passed to Masanobu's son Kano Motonobu (1476-1559). This launched the decorative Kano school of painting which dominated Japanese art for centuries thereafter. Sesshu was a renegade stylist who mastered the Sung formulas of Shubun early in his career and then developed striking new dimensions in ink painting. Despite his scornful assessments of Ming art, he learned a great deal in China which he later used, including an earthy realism that freed him from Shubun's sublime perfection, a sense of design that allowed him to produce large decorative sixfold screens which still retained the Zen spirit, and, perhaps most importantly, the Ch'an- inspired ''flung ink" technique which took him into the realm of semi- abstraction. In his later years he became famous for two distinct styles which, though not without Chinese precedents, were strongly individualistic.