Description:
Lacquerware furniture was typically of lightweight and rather delicate construction. Chinese artisans first created the wooden form or core for the object. These pieces, most often sewing tables, desks, card tables, gaming tables, or boxes, were all copied from Western models sent to China or adapted from design books. After painting and priming the core, lacquer (the sap of the Rhus veniciflua tree) was applied. The first extremely thin coating took several days to dry. After the first coating had hardened, a second followed, and thereafter possibly a third. In later periods lacquered objects with as many as several dozen layers became common. Workers mixed one of several pigments, often lampblack and cinnabar, into the liquid lacquer to use as paint. The final colorless coating acted as a protective skin. The time and labor involved in producing lacquerwares made them a luxury few New Englanders could afford. Osmond Tiffany’s The Canton Chinese (Boston, 1849) offered a look inside a lacquerware shop of the 1840s: We found in Hipqua’s establishment about forty persons, little boys just beginning their trade, and old men engaged on the best work. The ware is made of the wood of a kind of light fir … The workmen having brought the wood to the required shape of the article, and smoothed it carefully lays on a coat of lac, which is the gum of a shrub and may be tinged of any hue, the most common colors being brown, black, or red … It is then rubbed a long time with a smooth stone, and this process is repeated again and again until the several coats of lac are polished in the most perfect manner. It is now ready for ornamentation. A skillful hand pricks out the designed pattern on the black surface with a sharp steel point, and the delicate preparation of gold … is laid on with fine brushes. This being finished, the whole is once more carefully examined, and the article is ready for sale." The form of this box is rectangular with two brass bails attached to either side of the box. the box has a lift top, sliding front drawer with two locks in the front, the exterior of the box is decorated in black and gold with rectangular reserves of Chinese landscape of hills, rocks, and masses of buildings, the reserves are bordered by small repetitive designs of trefoils, a thin border of spear heads, and another border of small flowers and dots, the interior of the box is painted red and has a lift out, divided, wooden compartment, compartments are filled with circular porcelain containers of paint (watercolors), and the side section has two soapstone palettes, there is a Chinese character painted on the side of the box, the lower drawer has a variety of artifacts such as a circular porcelain dish, a broken porcelain dish with gilt residue, a leaf-shaped porcelain dish, a round porcelain bowl, a smaller porcelain dish, a brass spoon or dipper with handle, a piece of rock or mineral, a piece of colorless glass - perhaps a muddler, a key, two bamboo paint brushes with covers, and a some Chinese ink or colorant in stick form covered with Chinese characters and images. Condition: There are some losses and flaking of the lacquer on the outer side edges and lower edges of the box, but overall in very good shape.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2014.20.1 |
