The Virtuous Man, Kameda Bōsai

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Bosai was one of the most important Confucian scholars and Chinese-style poets in Japan during the early nineteenth century. He became renowned for his dynamic script, well represented in this single line of calligraphy which reads "The virtuous man patiently endures for fifty thousand years." Bosai has written out this Confucian ditum in a combination of regular and running scripts. His writing is imbued with an exhilarating freedom, the characters twisiting and turning but still maintaining an overall balance. At times Bosai moved his brush so quicly that one may see the paper through the strokes ("flying white").