Plate

Sauce/spice plate with separate tri-fold division on a large flat mirror. Made of wood, turned, lacquer-coated, sprayed with gold and silver dust. Covered with black kuro-urushi lac, highly polished. Decoration with a landscape made of fine-grained dust in two shades of gold. Depicts a coastal habitation on the background of rocks, pine trees and willows, flying geese. Water marked by small waves. Japan, Edo period, 18th/19th century. Lac is the resin of the Japanese sumac tree, which grows south of the Yangtze River, and is used in Japanese and Chinese decorative arts. It is often tinted. Japanese sumac resin is obtained by incising the bark, and then a thick sap flows from the tree in the form of gray emulsion. This substance darkens upon contact with air and hardens after evaporation of water. The resin is then purified and colored with metal oxides. The skeleton of the object was mainly made of sanded wood, sometimes covered with paper or canvas to even out the surface. Leather, metal, papier-mâché and a bamboo braid were also lacquered. Lac was applied many times before layering. After hardening, the surface was thoroughly polished. The number of layers applied depended on the decoration technique. In the case of smooth backgrounds a few layers were enough, in the case of carving even a few hundred. The lacquer provided the background for decoration. Lacquerwork techniques can generally be divided into incrustation, carving and decoration. The first two techniques originate from Chinese art, while carving is a Japanese contribution. Black and red lac was used to cover trays, combs, jewelry, clay vessels and even armors and coffins. The oldest lacquerware dates back to the 4th millennium BC. Over the centuries the art of lacquerware decoration almost disappeared, but was revived again in the 18th / 17th century AD. Lac was used to make or decorate furniture, dishes and paintbrushes. The process of decorating with this type of lac consisted of repeatedly covering the surface with resin and carving an ornament in each layer, which added the spatiality to the decoration. Lacquerware was first brought to Europe in the 16th century by the Jesuits. Lac became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.