Word: lacquerer
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Europe had its fashions in things Oriental: chinoiserie in the 18th century, Japanese screens and lacquer at the end of the 19th. But the Namban-ga, or "paintings of the southern barbarians" (the route from Europe lay round India, to the south), are a rare example of such a vogue in reverse. The very fact that, by the early 17th century, some feudal lord had commissioned a World Map and Four Major Cities of the World (see color), painted on twin eight-fold screens, is significant; his ancestors would not even have been curious, confidently locked as they were...
...world at large-has seen, its members were few and their identity often vague. Its founder was Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637). In 1615, a warlord gave Koetsu some land in the mountains around Kyoto. The artist laid out a village there: papermakers, dyers, weavers, calligraphers, lacquer masters and painters settled in it, with Koetsu presiding over them all. The collaborations that followed make it excruciatingly hard to determine which artist did what painting; Koetsu's style is almost indistinguishable from the early manner of his pupil Sotatsu...
...Ogata Kenzan to produce works like the hexagonal iron-brown dish bearing a figure of Juro, the dumpy little god of longevity. Korin had an almost miraculous sense of materials; witness his writing box, with a design of irises, pool and bridge. The iris leaves and stems are gold lacquer, the flowers mother-of-pearl inlay, the bridge columns are rendered in silver while the planks, which run diagonally across the lid and down the sides, are dull inlaid lead. What Renaissance casket would not look fussy and florid beside this container? But it was in painting that Korin...
...catchword, for nearly every item in this array-reputedly the best private collection of its kind in the world-was designed to nestle in the hand, and their ravishing tactile subtleties are lost behind glass. The largest are Suzuribako or writing boxes: a 16th century case with a gold-lacquer hare, or Kinyosai's delicately humorous image of a lady spurting ink from her mouth onto a wall to form the characters for "perseverance in love...
...guards. The amount of craft lavished on these small things almost surpasses belief. So, often, does their sculptural quality: witness Issan's tiny, writhing red dragon netsuke. To complete his inro bearing the motif of a Chinese ship, Ritsuo (1663-1747) had to apply some 80 coats of lacquer-the dangerously toxic sap from a Japanese relative of poison ivy. Lacquer is slow drying; it had to be left for days or even weeks between coats, and laboriously burnished with charcoal and powdered deer horn. To examine these objects is to realize how vast a language of craft...