ABSTRACT
In the world of art of this time one figure stands alone both for his originality and also for his versatility. This was Honami Kō-etsu. His family were the standard authorities on the connoisseurship of swords, and the first Honami died in 1352 at the age of a hundred, and since it still continues and practices the same calling it can be only of a little less antiquity than some of the lines of swordsmiths themselves. Kō-etsu was also a sword connoisseur and polisher, but that was perhaps the least of his accomplishments. He was reckoned, with Shokado SHōjō and the Kwampaku Konoe Ozan Nobuhiro (or his father Samboin Nobutada), as one of the Three Pens or Finest Calligraphists of his day, while he was not less skilled in painting, lacquer work, pottery, landscape gardening, tea, bronze casting, sculpture, Japanese poetry, and literature generally. He was also famous for his sand pictures and No masks. Perhaps he was the most versatile artist in modern Japanese history. He also published books on paper made at his art village, of which he designed the illustrations and binding. He was born in 1558 and died in 1638, aged eighty, and few people can have had a life better spent. Naturally he attracted the attention of Ieyasu, who became his patron, or one of them, for he was intimate with and assisted by all the great men of his day, and numbered all the artists and literary men among his friends. He has been called the William Morris of Japan, though perhaps it would be more correct to say that Morris was the English Kō-etsu. The only thing in which they differed was their political ideas, and since those socialistic views held by Morris were only the result of being born in perhaps the most unlovely age the world has ever seen, it is hardly likely he would have had any need for them had he lived in the Japan of Kō-etsu, which was almost certainly the diametrical opposite. Kō-etsu found stimulus in all the beauty, both natural and man-made, which surrounded him, just as he did in the ancient art traditions of the craftsmen whom he employed, and in the ripe appreciation of the aesthetes his contemporaries. These were not few. There were the two great tea-masters Furuta Oribe Kobori Enshu and Oda Yuraku, the greatest masters after Sen Rikyu, whom he must also have known. Kano Sanraku, and Sotan and Sosetsu, his followers Mitsunobu, Sansetsu, Tannyu, and Doun, all painters of the highest repute. The wealthy merchants Chaya Shirojiro, Suminokura Soan, Sano Soeki, and the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan. Of the great daimyos he was a friend of Maeda of Kaga and Matsudaira Izu-no-kami Nobutsuna, Doi Toshikatsu, and the two Kyoto Governors, Itakura Katsushige and Shigemune, and the two Konoes, and among the Kuge, Karasumaru Mitsuhiro.
