Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> One of the features of the exhibition that sets it apart from other collections seen in recent years in the West is the considerable number of fine boxes of Momoyama and early Edo date together with a series of inro dateable to the late 16th and 17th centuries the very earliest years of their production. The word ‘early’ needs to be used with care. Lacquer itself is recorded as having been in use as a decorative preservative in China as early as about 1000 BC and in Japan from about the 5th century BC. But portable inro only came into use during the second half of the 16th century AD. (Pekarik’s comment that ‘inro were unique to the period after 1600’ may be unduly conservative.) When considering the early days of inro production it may be helpful to take a look at the most comprehensive survey of early literary references to inro presently available. This will be found in the catalogue of the Go collection of Netsuke by Prof Hirokazu Arakawa the head curator of the Japanese Applied Arts Department of the Tokyo National Museum (published by Kodansha in 1983). Arakawa points out that inro are recorded from the late Kamakura period (1320) but that such early records refer to static storage containers albeit of several layered sections; whereas the earliest reference to portable inro hanging from the sash worn round the waist is given as 1636. Exceptions to this statement must presumably be made for the reference in Shoko Zuroku to the inro now in the British Museum (figs. 1 and 2) given by the Taiko Hideyoshi (d. 1598) to the Abbot of Kinkwan; to the famous letter of Will Adams to Richard Wickham about the latter’s ‘metsin box. (MP)