EDO PERIOD (17TH CENTURY)

Details

A lacquer writing box
Edo Period (17th Century)
A writing-box with flush-fitting lid, the outside of the lid with a black lacquer ground decorated in gold takamaki-e and hiramaki-e and gold and silver foil with peasants working in rice-paddies around a giant waterwheel beneath a tree-clad cliff down which descends a waterfall, the waterwheel (probably of ivory) and the mercury waterfall contained in a cavity set into the thickness of the lid and covered with thin, translucent horn so that the lid can be tilted to make the mercury turn the waterwheel, the whole mechanism in working order, a goose flying above the cliff and shells in the water below the cliff inlaid in metal, the edge of the lid with a gold hiramaki-e Greek-key design, the inside of the lid with a gold nashiji ground decorated in similar techniques to the outside with a ho-o [phoenix] seated in a paulownia tree by a stream inlaid with metal crags, the inside of the box with a gold nashiji tray and baseboard similarly decorated with orange and pine trees, rocks and a stream, the plain inkstone with a gold-lacquered rim, the silvered metal foliate water-dropper set into a three-tier fitting of silvered metal, shakudo and copper, the remaining surfaces decorated in nashiji of varying density, the rims of the box and lid of lead, slight old wear
8 3/8 x 7 5/8 x 1½ in. (21.3 x 19.4 x 3.8cm.)

Provenance

Bing Collection
Fournier Collection

Special notice

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Lot Essay

This box from the Bing and Fournier collections 1 is one of the earliest known examples of a writing-box with a mercury-driven miniature waterwheel. Although Anne Yonemura states in the catalogue of the Freer Gallery of Art that such boxes appear to have first been made during the eighteenth century, the style and technique of this box point to a date in the second half of the seventeenth century. While the Freer box features a waterwheel in the Yodo River, a favourite subject for lacquerwares and painted screens from the sixteenth century onwards 2, both this example and the later writing-box in the Nezu Institute of Fine Arts, Tokyo, depict an imaginary landscape loosely based on Muromachi-period landscape painting 3; the Freer and Nezu boxes use glass rather than horn to contain the mercury and wheel. The phoenix and paulownia motif on the back of the lid, a symbol of power and authority favoured by the potentate Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), is seen frequently in Kano painting of the late sixteenth century and made its first appearance in lacquerware at around the same date 4. The combination of a classical lacquer theme with an ingenious mechanism powered by mercury powerfully evokes the private, sometimes playful world of the Edo-period daimyo [feudal lords] and their cloistered womenfolk who spent much of their lives confined in official residences in Edo, the shogunal capital.

1 Christie's, Fine Japanese Lacquer, Porcelain, Ivories and Works of Art, auction catalogue (London, 18 July 1979), no. 97.
2 Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan [Kyoto National Museum], Maki-e, shikkoku to ogon no Nihonbi [The beauty of black and gold Japanese lacquer] (Kyoto, 1995), no. 178.
3 Arakawa Hirokazu (ed.), Nihon no shitsugei 4: maki-e IV [Lacquer art of Japan part 4, Maki-e, section IV] (Tokyo, 1978), nos. 136-7; Anne Yonemura, Japanese Lacquer [in the Freer Gallery of Art] (Washington DC, 1979), no. 25.
4 Okada Jo and others (ed.),Nihon no shitsugei 3: maki-e III [Lacquer art of Japan part 3, Maki-e, section III] (Tokyo, 1978), nos. 91-2 (writing- box and writing-table with phoenix and paulownia design)

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