Page 103 - Christie's Irving Collection Lacquer Bronse jade and Ink March 2019

VERSATILE GENIUS

IN THE ART OF L ACQUER

S H I B ATA Z ES H I N 1 8 0 7–18 9 1)
(

Well known in the West as a painter and a lacquer Zeshin ultimately developed his own unique formula,
artist, Shibata Zeshin enjoyed longevity in both his life and adding substances that made the lacquer slightly fexible,
his career. He began his prolifc and versatile career at age so that it would not fake of. He achieved such remarkable
eleven as an apprenticeship with the leading lacquer artist, success that even today he holds a place of preeminence
Koma Kan’ya (Kansai II, 1767–1835) the tenth-generation as Japan’s most celebrated “lacquer painting” (urushi-e)
head of a lacquer studio in Edo (now Tokyo) that had served artist. Moreover, his fame spread abroad during his lifetime,
the Tokugawa shogunate since 1636. and his lacquer paintings were featured in numerous
international exhibitions, including the Vienna World
Ever ambitious, at sixteen, Zeshin also began to train as a Exposition in 1873, the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition
painter under Suzuki Nanrei (1775–1844) of the Shijō school, in 1876, and the frst Paris exhibition of Japanese painting
moving to Kyoto around the age of twenty to apprentice in 1883.
with another Shijo-school painter, Okamoto Toyohiko
(1773–1845), who favored the new Western naturalism. In Florence and Herbert Irving had a special relationship with
Kyoto, Zeshin would become profcient in the traditional the Tokyo dealer Klaus Naumann (b. 1935), from whom they
arts of tea ceremony and poetry, notably haiku. He returned purchased three important works by Shibata Zeshin (lots
to Edo in his late twenties to take up his calling as a lacquer 810, 811, 812). They sought out Naumann in Tokyo on a trip
artist. A master of evocative designs and inventive, subtle to Japan around 1986 and immediately purchased several
new techniques, Zeshin was soon acclaimed as the leading of the Negoro-ware red lacquers for which their collection
artist in this painstaking and time-consuming medium. is known. (For more about Naumann and the Irvings, see
His lacquers, dazzling in their technical virtuosity and ”Still Learning”: A Conversation with Klaus F. Naumann,”
trompe l’oeil efects (he could imitate metal, wood and in Impressions 40 [2019] the journal of the Japanese Art
ceramics in lacquer), are still the most highly coveted by Society of America, <www.japaneseartsoc.org>.) Later,
Western collectors. His success may be measured by the after the collection had expanded to include fne Chinese
fact that his large atelier numbered among its clients not and Korean lacquers, Naumann advised the Irvings to
only prominent businessmen and government oficials, but include works by one of Japan’s greatest artists, Zeshin—no
Emperor Meiji himself. His public commissions included collection would be complete without some choice pieces
decorating wooden doors and ceiling roundels for the new by this artist. Zeshin had already come into the spotlight
imperial palace. In 1890, when the government inaugurated in America with the publication and exhibition in 1979 of
the title “Artist to the Imperial Household” (Teishitsu the Mary Louise and James E. O’Brien collection of over
Gigeiin), Zeshin was one of the ten artists—and the only one hundred of the artist’s lacquers, lacquer paintings, and
lacquerer—to receive the award. prints formed in California and donated to the Honolulu
Academy of Arts (now the Honolulu Museum of Art). In
It was in his old age, during the 1870s and 1880s, that 2007, over ffty Zeshin lacquers and paintings from the
Zeshin added an unusual new technique to his repertoire. Catherine and Thomas Edson Collection were exhibited at
In response to the popularity of oils in the Meiji period, the San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, where they remain
he began to paint with lacquer on paper, silk, and wooden as a promised gift. In 2009, over seventy of the Edson’s
panels. The naturally dark colors and thick, lustrous Zeshin lacquers were exhibited in a traveling exhibition
surface texture of the colored lacquer added to the illusion shown at three museums in Japan. As Joe Earle noted in
of Western pigments. However, painting with lacquer in his excellent introduction to the San Antonio catalogue,
traditional Japanese scroll formats presented special Zeshin’s visual world is “so distinctive that there is normally
challenges—the lacquer had to be fexible enough to no need to search for his tiny signature, often scratched
withstand cracking as scrolls were rolled and unrolled. with a rat’s tooth in the dark surface.”

101