DECORATIVE PIECES. The minor decorative arts of Japan are known to us as those of no Eastern nation are known, because, in the main, of the sudden breaking up and scattering of the great princely collections during the civil wars of 1SGS and thereafter. The daimios or terri torial nobles took sides strongly, and all felt the immediate need of raising money by all possible expedients. The result was that Europe and the United States 'were offered an astonishing number of works of art in pottery, metal-work, woodwork, ivory. and textiles.
By the time when the French Universal Exhibi tion was held in I SIB, it had become possible to classify these works of art by their material, and also in a rough way by their epoch. It appeared then that there was but little to he learned of Japan in the way of porcelain—that chief of the ceramic arts remaining the special property of the Chinese. On the other hand, the Japanese were found to excel in the hard potteries, both highly finished and richly decorated, and also rough and apparently careless in design, but in te:flity showing great. independence of spirit and ,rut ease of manipulation on the part of the village potters. With these there came metal work in small pieces, and this marked by two strongly distinguished traits. The hammered ironwork and the larger and bolder bronzes were of extraordinary strength of design; the added ornament of exti ewe delicacy. _111 iron tray so irregular and arbitrary in form and in the twistings and eurlings of its edges as to startle the European. would be decorated by a re tined and minute design in gold dainaskeening which might rival in delicacy and exeel in free dom that of the Moslem East. The other variety of metal-work. was distinguished by its extreme minuteness, and by the delicate play of differing colors: for the Japanese hail introduced into common utility three or four alloys unknown to Europe. such as the shakudo. the
silvery-gray shibuichi, and two or three deep red or pale red alloys of copper: aid had also devis«1 the plan of hammering one pierced plate of metal into another in such a way that the re sulting surface was waved and veined like a marble of very minute structure. These new metallic colors and surfaces were combined with silver. with gold in several different lines, and with bronze colored artificially in an infinite number of shades, and were used in minute relief patterns, producing the most effeetive aromatic designs on a very small scale that had ever been seen. A somewhat similar effect of color relief was found to exist in the work of the artists in lacquer. A small box or a panel three feet long might equally become the medium for such adornment. The varnished painting itself having an unniatelied toughness and permanence caused by the unequaled mate rial used, the sap of the sumac, Rims rcr vieifcra, was found to be capable of such manipulation by means of the brush that relief patterns of sufficient projection and of very great flexibility and variety of form were producible in it, and with these reliefs were combined those of inserted pieces of ivory. of its natural color or stained, of pottery, of mother-of-pearl, and of metal, so that a most elaborate design of flowers, fruits, birds, and small ani thels would be given in twenty different hues, each carried through an untraceable »umber of delicate gradations, and the whole combined with a fitting and tasteful background of the smooth and polished