Lot Essay
A similar example is in the Schonbrunn, Vienna.
The design on the cover, featuring a scholar in Chinese dress seated at a Chinese-style table preparing to write on a sheet of paper held by a servant, is probably based, at several removes, on a Chinese or Japanese painting featuring the "Four Accomplishments" (music, go, calligraphy and painting). Although outlandish-looking figures are seen on a few later examples of export lacquer [see 1 below], the overall design of this piece, with geometric borders and ogival panels of decoration featuring leopard-like felines derived from Kano-school painting, suggests a date towards the middle of the seventeenth century. It seems that from the 1630's until about the 1650's certain features of the earlier Namban style were still retained, although lacquer was used in place of mother-of-pearl and rayskin for the borders and the undecorated spandrels around the pictorial panels [see 2 below], and there are extensive areas left black, in contrast to the dense decoration of the Namban pieces.
1. One example is a folding lacquer screen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
2. Kyoto National Museum, Maki-e, shikkoku to ogon no Nihonbi. [The beauty of black and gold Japanese lacquer], (Kyoto, 1995), no. 154 is an example of the Namban precursor of this style of decoration which was later adapted and simplified for the Dutch market.
The design on the cover, featuring a scholar in Chinese dress seated at a Chinese-style table preparing to write on a sheet of paper held by a servant, is probably based, at several removes, on a Chinese or Japanese painting featuring the "Four Accomplishments" (music, go, calligraphy and painting). Although outlandish-looking figures are seen on a few later examples of export lacquer [see 1 below], the overall design of this piece, with geometric borders and ogival panels of decoration featuring leopard-like felines derived from Kano-school painting, suggests a date towards the middle of the seventeenth century. It seems that from the 1630's until about the 1650's certain features of the earlier Namban style were still retained, although lacquer was used in place of mother-of-pearl and rayskin for the borders and the undecorated spandrels around the pictorial panels [see 2 below], and there are extensive areas left black, in contrast to the dense decoration of the Namban pieces.
1. One example is a folding lacquer screen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
2. Kyoto National Museum, Maki-e, shikkoku to ogon no Nihonbi. [The beauty of black and gold Japanese lacquer], (Kyoto, 1995), no. 154 is an example of the Namban precursor of this style of decoration which was later adapted and simplified for the Dutch market.