AN IMITATION-METAL LACQUER BOWL

The lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891) was one of the elite group of craftsmen, schooled in the fashions of the Edo period who made the great leap from the dictates of the feudal society into the Age of Enlightenment and Westernization in Japan in the Meiji era (1868 -1912). He developed the technique of using lacquer as a painting medium which gives an impression of richness and three-dimensionality. The lacquer painting of Bonsai in the collection of Metropolitan Museum, shows Zeshin’s skillful brushwork and various texture with lacquer (fig. 1.)
Sahari is an alloy of copper, tin and lead that was used traditionally for flower containers and trays for Buddhist rituals and for vases, vessels and trays adapted for the practice of tea. Zeshin invented the technique of lacquer with a sahari finish, or sahari-nuri, to imitate the irregular and oxidized surface of the metal prototypes. Here, he adds a further twist by making the bowl of pressed paper, extremely light in contrast to the heavy metal bowl one would expect to encounter. The lacquer historian Takao Yo has explained that microscopic examination of Zeshin’s sahari-nuri shows it to be a mixture of metal powders resulting in colors “somewhere between” those of his lacquer imitations of patinated bronze (seido-nurii) and of silvered copper (shibuichi-nuri).