Kozuka with Chinese Poem by Kano Natsuo

A tsuba of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, signed and dated to the autumn of Bunkyu 1 (1861) when Kano Natsuo was thirty-four, is recorded in his own working notes, the Saiku Shirabe no Ki[[c:1]], as taking two days and a night for the drawing and more than a month for the carving. The published sources call Natsuo "the last great master of machibori"[[c:2]], the town-carvers who worked outside the official Goto house. He was born in Kyoto in the Bunsei era and adopted as a child by the sword dealer Kano Jisuke. At twelve he entered the workshop of the metalworker Okumura Shohachi, and at fourteen he learned metalwork under Ikeda Koju of the Otsuki school, signing Juro before he took the name Natsuo. In the same years he read the Chinese classics under Tanimori Tanematsu and studied painting under Nakajima Raisho, the Maruyama-Shijo master, and the sources hold that his standing as the last machibori master owed most "to the grounding cultivated in these Kyoto years"[[c:3]]. At twenty-seven he went to Edo, where his art matured. After the Restoration the government entrusted him with the prototype models for the new coinage, and in 1890 he became a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and, in the same year, one of the first Teishitsu Gigeiin, the artists appointed to the court. He died in 1898 at seventy-one.

His hand is a painter's naturalism carried in a disciplined chisel. The published sources praise again and again his outstanding power of drawing from life joined to minute carving. Of the bamboo-grove guard they admire the composition that values empty space and the clear, lifelike chisel work, and close by calling it "a celebrated tsuba taut with living spirit"[[c:4]]. On an iron tsuba of peonies of 1863 the great flower sways in an early-summer breeze on the front, while the reverse carries only the leaves, cut quietly from close sketching. On a guard of wind-blown bamboo and flowing water, set on a shibuichi day-and-night plate, they judge that "the sensibility and carving that seize at once the real and its spirit are outstanding"[[c:5]].

His technical range runs across the soft metals and iron. He works shakudo, both on a rough-finished plate and on nanako, iron, and shibuichi in the day-and-night manner, in takabori and sukidashi relief, sukisage and sukidashi-bori, with gold, silver and copper inlay and iro-e. He often finishes the rim as an uchikaeshi-mimi. His nanako, the sources note, is uncommon and found mainly in early work. His colour can be held to a minimum, as on one guard where the iro-e is limited to touches of gold, and his rain is singled out as a subject handled in a way all his own, falling on pine, peony, lotus and orchid as well as on wild geese.

The published sources trace his debt to the past precisely. A rain-and-geese tsuba of 1862 is one that "Natsuo's own records explicitly call in the Kaneie manner"[[c:6]], its composition and its turned-back rim modelled on Kaneie, with the influence of Yasuchika also seen. On a late iron guard of geese beneath the moon, made in 1882, the open space filled with layers of air, the perspective and the high relief of the parent birds show that "the traces of his study of Kaneie, called the father of the pictorial tsuba, are unmistakable"[[c:7]]. His subjects range from Chinese themes such as the Seven Sages and the Four Gentlemen to the kyogen play Suehirogari, peonies, egrets in willows and the creatures of the sea.

Across his career the dated works allow the hand to be followed. A daisho pair of the four seasons, signed in Kyoto in his mid-twenties just before he left for Edo, is one of his rare daisho guards. A mitokoromono of the Four Gentlemen, dated Ansei 3 (1856) the year after he reached Edo and signed proudly as a man of the capital, is a rare example of his three-piece sets. Several of his finest guards date to the Bunkyu years, and his late iron guards of the Meiji era carry the same quality: one of 1884 crowded with fish and shells in many coloured metals is called "a tsuba that may be called the culmination of Natsuo's craft"[[c:8]].

For the collector Natsuo stands at the head of his field on the designation record: ten of his works have been raised to Tokubetsu Juyo, a count among fittings makers matched only by Yasuchika, beside sixty-two at the Juyo level. Recorded provenance is thin, but the wind-and-bamboo tsuba descended in the Satake house, the lords of Akita, through the domain period. Signed Natsuo fittings at the designated level appear only from time to time and are sought by the most serious collectors of late Edo and Meiji metalwork, so a documented example is a rare encounter rather than an expected one.