The Kano (加納) school of kinko metalwork centers on the towering figure of Kanō Natsuo (1828–1898), the master whom the consistently acclaim as "the last great master of " (町彫, town carving). Born in Kyoto in Bunsei 11 (1828), Natsuo was adopted while still young by the sword dealer Kanō Jisuke, whose family name the lineage bears. At twelve he entered the atelier of the metalworker Okumura Shōhachi, and at fourteen he studied metalworking techniques under Ikeda Kōju of the Ōtsuki school, signing his early work Jurō (寿朗) before adopting the name Natsuo. In the period he pursued the reading of classical Chinese texts (sodoku) under Tanimori Tanematsu and studied painting with Nakajima Raishō, a master of the Maruyama–Shijō school — and, as the repeatedly affirm, his later renown "owes much to the cultivation of these attainments during his Kyoto years." At twenty-seven he went to , where he refined his art and achieved full maturity, answering the commissions of houses and private patrons alike: a "made at the request of the Katō family," and a celebrated wind-blown bamboo transmitted in the Satake family, lords of Akita domain.
The school's shared vocabulary unites an exceptional range of grounds and techniques under a painter's discipline. Grounds include polished iron (), in (rare, and characteristic of the early period) and , the "day-and-night" composite of iron and (), and the hallmark tiger-stripe (torafu) . Upon these, relief in of "markedly dignified" character is joined by and — the V-cut engraving that mimics the ink brush — together with hira-zōgan, suemon-zōgan, , and keshikomi-, and polychrome employing gold, silver, , , , brass, and even shell inlay. Yet the manner is equally defined by restraint: on the rain-and-geese the palette is "confined to gold alone, applied with restraint." Grounded in meticulous sketching from life in the Maruyama–Shijō spirit, the compositions reserve broad expanses of space and give particular weight to "the layers of atmosphere that fill that space"; the ability to express a subject "with tasteful restraint and an effortless clarity" despite employing a variety of metals and methods is, the observe, the school's true strength. The pictorial tradition is consciously invoked — Natsuo's study of Kaneie, "revered as the founder of so-called pictorial-style (efū )," is explicit in his own notes, and the influence of Yasuchika is likewise discerned — across motifs ranging from fish, egrets and willows, geese in rain, peonies, and the Four Gentlemen to the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, kyōgen scenes, and the moon upon the water.
With the Meiji Restoration the school's legacy passed beyond sword fittings into the new nation's artistic metalwork: Natsuo was entrusted by the government with the master models for casting the new coinage, entered the Osaka Mint in Meiji 2, and in Meiji 23 (1890) became a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, being selected that year as one of the first Teishitsu Gigeiin (Imperial Household Artists). He died in Meiji 31 (1898) at seventy-one, remembered as "a master craftsman who brought the history of Japanese sword-fitting metalwork to its crowning conclusion." The accord his finest works the highest language of the canon: the Seven Sages is praised for its taut "spirit resonance and vitality" (kiin seidō), the water-moon is called "a point of arrival in Natsuo's art," and the Meiji 17 (1884) of teeming sea creatures is judged "a consummation of Natsuo's decorative metalwork." Bridging the late decorative tradition and Meiji artistic metalwork, the Kano school stands at the very summit of the tosogu canon.