PAINTER, WRITER, ANIMA CANDIDA, philosopher in the true sense ot the word, Makino Yoshio (1869—1956) lived in London for nearly half a century from 1897 to 1942. He painted misty and mysterious views of Edwardian London. He wrote four books of memoirs and philosophy in his own special style of English. He made friends with people from every walk of life. He was a Suffragette, ardently supporting the cause of Votes for Women. He fell in love, idealistically and platonically, with several English women. He would never have left England had it not been for the outbreak of the Second World War, and he was always hoping, however vainly, to come back.

For years he suffered undeserved neglect. His paintings, once so admired, were forgotten, and his books, once so praised, were relegated to the shilling shelves of second-hand bookshops. But in the odd way that synchronicities assert themselves, interest in his work revived, suddenly and simultaneously, in both Britain and Japan. In Japan in 1990 a splendid exhibition of his work was mounted in Toyota city. Large crowds of people hitherto ignorant of his name and his work were enchanted by the beauty of his views of London, Oxford, Rome and Pans, which so vividly evoked the vanished atmosphere of the beginning of the century. In Bntam his books have been repnnted, and a permanent gallery of his work established in London. He has been rediscovered after some seventy years as a painter and a personality of rare spmtual genius.

Let me introduce him as I saw him in 1953, by a lucky chance, climbing slowly up the stone steps leading to Tokei-ji in Kitakamakura. An old man in a battered panama hat, a shirt covered in smears of blue and green paint, and long white hair curling down to his shoulders, an unusual sight at that time. He earned a sketchbook in his hand, and frequently paused for breath as he climbed. At the top I caught him up and greeted him. In very nearly perfect English he told me that he had lived in England for forty-six years, and that his name was Yoshio Markino.