It is well over a dozen years since the Japan Society of New York got together a number of important Japanese works of art in a special exhibition. Since that time there has been no chance in America to see such things except in the comparatively monotonous form in which they are set out by the few museums which posess them. Mr. Charles Baine Hoyt's loan collection, just opened at the Fogg Museum, is therefore of more than local interest. Three rooms have been devoted to a pleasantly sparse distribution of potteries and paintings where even the laymen must see at once that he moves among aristocrats. Ever since it opened last Fall the Fogg has given us interesting arrangements, but this time, from the heaped pomegranates on the offering tables to the elaborately careless distribution of pots in the cases, the setting up of the show is beyond all cavil.

The Buddhist paintings, with three exceptions, do not belong to the Hoyt collection, and of course are not as important as those to be found in the Boston Museum, which are the best outside the Orient. But these are of very real and decorative value. The Nirvana of the Buddha, half obliterated as it is, contains some splendid passages of color and most vivid drawings of the animals that mourn about the death couch.

However, it is the work of the school of Great Decorators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which makes the contents of these three rooms stand out in the memory of the casual observer, the student lounging there after a Fine Arts examination. That screen on the dais, with its silver gray background and autumn flowers behind a brushwood fence, is echoed in the huge grey globe of Shigaraki pottery. The red camelia of the screen finds a red reflection in the lacquer of the ancient stand below. So too with the insolent macaw by Jakucho as his whiteness is given the emphasis of repetition in the whiteness of the jar beneath him. In short the arrangement is as winning as the selection of objects is remarkable.

Few connoiseurs in this country are competent to declare on the authenticity of certain potteries which bear the signature of the great Kenzan, who dashed a playful brush over so many tea bowls and cake dishes and who lacquered and painted and carved in wood. It has proved distressingly easy for the generations since his time to immitate his eccentricities but none seems quite to have caught his laugh. It is too much like translating Heine. This exhibition contains no less than seven examples in pottery and one painting ascribed to Kenzan; all are remarkably like the master's work, some of them are almost certainly by him. Koyetsu, less known abroad than his pupil Korin, is represented if only in delightful reproduction by a huge black pottery raven leaning forward to caw and by a single painting, more important, perhaps, than anything else in the three rooms. This is a tiny square of paper on which, in blue and gold, is a wave overlaid in spidery characters with that famous poem of the seventh century:

"Across Akashi Bay

Beyond the islet,

Half hid in dawn mist

Passes the boat

Bearing my heart."