subjects. Artists focused almost exclusively on landscapes and birds and flowers. Poetry or other inscriptions were also an important element of these paintings, and were often in fact added by friends of the artist, not by the painter himself. Unlike in other schools of art which have definite founders who pass on their specific style to their students or followers, nanga was always much more about the attitude espoused by the painter and his love of Chinese culture. Thus, as mentioned before, every bunjin artist displayed unique elements in his creations, and many even diverged greatly from the stylistic elements employed by their forebears and contemporaries. As Japan became exposed to Western culture at the end of the Edo period, many bunjin began to incorporate stylistic elements of Western art into their own, though they nearly always avoided Western subjects and stuck strictly to traditional Chinese ones. Master Kuwayama Gyokushū (1746–1799) was the acutest theorist on Japanese literati painting. In his three books – Gyokushū gashu (Collected works of Gyokushū, 1790), Gaen higen (A Modest Commentary on Painting, 1795) and Kaiji higen (Humble Words on Matters of Painting, 1799) – invited all Japanese literati painters to apply the theories and literati ideals of Dong Qichang (J: Tō Kishō, 1555–1636). According to the scholar Meccarelli, Kuwayama may be considered the ‘Japanese Dong Qichang’, but he mixed both the polychromatic landscapes typical of professional painters and the monochromatic landscapes of literati styles, and he applied a new and more flexible criteria for classification. Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō, two of the first to introduce Japanese art in any major way to the West, are known to have criticized nanga as trivial and derivative. As a result, the style has only attracted academic attention in the West in recent decades, roughly 100 years later. Cultural derivations A particular style of bonsai is called variously bunjin, bunjingi or "literati" and is intended to look like the trees portrayed in nanga art. Examples of the style are often elegantly elongated and with few branches, being mainly a long slim trunk surmounted by a very small mass of foliage. The art of flower arrangement ikebana developed the bunjinbana (文人花) style, which was in homage to Chinese landscapes and literati paintings. Notable artists Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724) Yosa Buson (1716–1783) Ike no Taiga (1723–1776) Kameda Bōsai (1752–1826) Tani Bunchō (1763–1841) Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853) Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856) Watanabe Kazan