.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In the last years of the eighteenth century the Dutch East India Company started to charter American ships in order to ensure that they would be able to send the correct number of vessels to Nagasaki each year in accordance with their exclusive agreement with the Japanese authorities. The first of these ships, the Eliza of New York, was wrecked in 1797, but another ship, the Franklin of Salem, made it to Japan in 1799, reaching Nagasaki on 19 July. The personal account books of the Captain of the Franklin, James Devereux, record that he brought back a considerable quantity of lacquer, all of it apparently in contemporary European shapes, including '22 lacked knife boxes' (Charles H.P.Copeland, 'Japanese export furniture', Antiques, LXVI, July 1954, pp. 50-1); some of these might have been knife-cases like those, in the shape fashionable in about 1770, in the Clive collection at Powis Castle (Mary Archer and others, Treasures from India: The Clive Collection at Powis Castle, London, 1987, cat. no. 193), but others were most likely knife-urns like the present examples. Another American vessel, the Margaret, visited Nagasaki in 1801 and her co-owner and Captain, Samuel Gardner Derby, is known to have acquired a Japanese knife-urn that is now preserved in the Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.
This distinctive pair of knife-urns is very similar to a pair in the Royal Collection, to the Peabody example and to another urn acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which is inscribed on the interior with the name of the maker, Kiyotomo; the same name, together with an address in the Sanjo-Teramachi district of Kyoto, written in a somewhat uneducated hand, has been found inside a fragmentary urn in a private collection (Oliver Impey, Sasaya Kisuke, Kyoto 'Nagasaki' Lacquer and the woodworker Kiyotomo, Oriental Art, vol. XLIV no. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 28-32).
A closely related pair of urns was sold anonymously Christie's, London, 17 November 1999, lot 201 (£78,500 including premium). These bore various inscriptions (some unclear) to the insides including possibly the signature of the lacquerer or a workshop address.
This distinctive pair of knife-urns is very similar to a pair in the Royal Collection, to the Peabody example and to another urn acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which is inscribed on the interior with the name of the maker, Kiyotomo; the same name, together with an address in the Sanjo-Teramachi district of Kyoto, written in a somewhat uneducated hand, has been found inside a fragmentary urn in a private collection (Oliver Impey, Sasaya Kisuke, Kyoto 'Nagasaki' Lacquer and the woodworker Kiyotomo, Oriental Art, vol. XLIV no. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 28-32).
A closely related pair of urns was sold anonymously Christie's, London, 17 November 1999, lot 201 (£78,500 including premium). These bore various inscriptions (some unclear) to the insides including possibly the signature of the lacquerer or a workshop address.