Page 53 - Bonhams May 16, 2019 London Japanese Art

Crafted in Kyoto’s lacquer workshops alongside quite different wares ensembles as well—to brighten the brooding interior spaces of their
intended for elite Japanese clients, coffers and cabinets decorated in magnificent palaces and castles.
gold hiramaki-e and shell were among the earliest Japanese artefacts
to reach Asian and European markets, starting two or three decades The decoration of this outstanding cabinet, with lively animal, bird
after the first landfall by Portuguese adventurers in the mid-sixteenth and flower designs placed within rich floral and geometric ornament,
century. Celebrated today for their lavish, innovative technique and points to a date during the closing years of the sixteenth century or
dense ornamentation inspired in part by wares from other parts of the opening decades of the seventeenth, when such wares partially
Asia, such pieces brought the Japanese genius for design to global reflected contemporary pictorial trends within Japan, particularly the
attention and ensured that the word ‘Japan’ would be synonymous dramatic treatment of the tiger and leopard, which echo contemporary
with ‘lacquer’ down to the present day. masterpieces by Eitoku and other leaders of the Kano painting
academy.
Traded along newly opened global sea routes, Japanese lacquers
offered Asian and European monarchs alike a distant glimpse of the For a discussion on fall-front cabinets of this type, along with
splendours of the Momoyama age, when great warlords like Toyotomi comparative examples, see Oliver Impey and Christian Jörg,
Hideyoshi (1537–1598) took overall control of the country. Hideyoshi Japanese Export Lacquer 1580-1850, Amsterdam, Hotei Publishing,
and his rivals, vassals and successors ordered lavish use of gold— 2005, pp.122-124.
not just on lacquer wares but on folding screens and wall-painting

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