UNSIGNED, EDO PERIOD (CIRCA 1800)

Between the years 1797 and 1809 Britain and Holland were technically at war, leading the Dutch authorities in Batavia (Jakarta) to charter neutral ships to carry on the trade with Japan so as to avoid the risk of their own fleet being captured by hostile British ships. The first of these charters was the Eliza of New York, although recent research suggests there is some doubt whether she was really an American ship; nor is it certain that the ship's master, Captain William Robert Stewart, was a U.S. citizen. Stewart sailed to Nagasaki in both 1797 and 1798 but the Eliza was lost at sea in 1799, although Stewart himself mysteriously reappeared in Nagasaki in 1800 on board another vessel, the Emperor of Japan. Another, undoubtedly American, seaman, Captain James Devereux, sailed to Nagasaki in 1799 in command of the Franklin, which is believed to be the first U.S. ship to return to American with a cargo from Japan: its cargo even included among a collection of 'curiosities' what may be the very first Japanese woodblock prints (by Utamaro) to have entered the United States. Two further vessels sailed to Nagasaki, the Massachusetts in 1800 and the Margaret in 1801, and the captain of the latter, Samuel Gardner Derby, donated several Japanese items to the East India Marine Society. Some of these, including a vanity with standup mirror that is very similar to the present lot, are now in the Peabody Essex Museum.1

These wares have traditionally been referred to as 'Nagasaki' wares (on the analogy, perhaps, of 'Imari' porcelain which was shipped through and not made in Imari), but Dr. Oliver Impey of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, has demonstrated convincingly by means of an 1864 business directory that at least some 'Nagasaki' lacquers were actually made in Kyoto,2 demonstrating a link between Japan's old capital and the shipping industry of New England more than half a century before U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry's celebrated 'opening' of Japan in 1853-4. A recent exhibition at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, drawn from the Peabody Essex collections, included a number of these export lacquers and explores the part played by Pacific whaling in forming early Japanese-American relations, presenting a body of evidence which reminds us that for the United States as for Europe, we should interpret the events of the mid-19th century as less a climactic act of enforced enlightenment and more a decisive stage in a gradual process of mutual discovery that can be traced back to the arrival of the first Europeans in 1543.

1 Edo Tokyo Hakubutsukan [Edo-Tokyo Museum], Nichibei koryu no akebono [Worlds Revealed: The Dawn of Japanese and American Exchange] (Tokyo, 1999), pp. 60-1 and cat. no. 3-50

2 Oliver Impey, Sasaya Kisuke, Kyoto 'Nagasaki' Lacquer and the woodworker Kiyotomo, Oriental Art, vol. XLIV no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 28-32