ABSTRACT
Quick sketches, made with the ease of writing, have left a complete history of the life of the nation. Every artist of note in the past made thousands of impressions of people engaged in the homely actions of everyday life: women washing their hair, a man with tweezers pulling hair from his chin while women peek and giggle, a child "skinning the cat" with his loose clothes falling down exposing the plump little body, as well as many others I could mention that would hardly pass the censor. We now have photographs as a record of life in modern times, but there is no record of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even approaching the completeness of that left by artists in Japan.
