Thanks to the generous support of the Friends of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives, the Art Fund, and ACE (Arts Council England)/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has recently acquired a beautiful Japanese lacquer box.
The box comprises of two tiers, a lid and an inner tray, dates to the Meiji Period (1868-1912), and once stored articles for the incense ceremony. The incense ceremony is the art of appreciating incense by comparing various scents and identifying them through games. During the Edo period (1603-1868), lacquered boxes were prepared to contain the necessary utensils for the incense ceremony by parents for a daughter when she was about to be married.
Decorating the box are eleven utensils of the Japanese tea ceremony. Among them are a bamboo ‘one-cut’ flower vase, a porcelain incense burner, a bamboo water scoop resting on a celadon stand, an iron kettle decorated with dragons, a bamboo whisk for preparing the tea, a ceramic water jar with a glossy black lacquer lid, a bamboo tea scoop, a fabric drawstring pouch, and a feather for wafting incense. Impressively, all the motifs save the inlay for the porcelain burner are made of lacquer. The box provides a virtuoso example of the lacquer skills and techniques that craftsmen refined during the Meiji period (1868-1912).
Lacquer has a long history in Japan dating back as early as 7000 BCE. Harvesting, processing and applying lacquer (poison oak sap) is a long and hazardous process that takes several months. Only about 200 grammes of sap can be harvested during the 14-15-year life of the urushi lacquer tree and it takes a further three to five years after harvesting for the sap to mature. It is poisonous to touch in its raw form and even breathing in its fumes can be dangerous. The lacquering process is incredibly time-consuming and labour-intensive; each coat must be thinly applied and dried before it is polished and the next coat applied to build up the shiny surface
The tea ceremony is an important Japanese cultural activity with a long history that dates to the 9th century when tea was drunk as a stimulant by Buddhist monks to improve concentration during meditation. Over the centuries the ceremony has evolved from the aesthetic pastime of aristocrats to a arena for the politicking of warriors, from a salon activity for business elites, to a hobby for largely middle-class housewives today. The tea ceremony involves preparing and drinking tea with a focus on hospitality. It has been credited with having a significant impact on Japanese taste and aesthetics, notably the concepts of wabi and sabi, the appreciation and acceptance of transience and imperfection.
Thanks to a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant, I travelled to Japan to research Japanese porcelain in March 2022. With the Friends’ generous support, I was able to acquire additional contemporary and antique Japanese works relating to the Japanese tea and incense ceremonies, objects that will complement this lacquer box in future displays.
