SPECIAL SUBJECTS
"enamels" was produced by a Japanese artist prior to the year 1838. It is necessary to insist upon this fact because one of the most notable exponents of Japanese art, the late Mr. J. L. Bowes, who alone has hitherto undertaken to discuss Japanese enamels at any length, fell into the serious error of imagining that numerous enamelled vessels which began to be exported to Europe from the year 1865, were the outcome of industry commencing in the sixteenth century and reaching its point of culmination at the beginning of the eighteenth. In his work "Japanese Decorative Art," Mr. Bowes divided these objects into three classes, "early, middle-period, and modern," and he subsequently supported his views in an elaborately reasoned thesis called "Notes on Shippō." There is not the slenderest ground for such a theory.[1] It certainly seems somewhat strange that whereas vases and censers of cloisonné enamel manufactured in China came to Japan during the latter part of the Ming era and throughout the whole of the Tsing—in other words, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth—similar works were not executed by the Japanese. The explanation is that these specimens did not appeal strongly to Japanese taste: they never won the approval of the tea-clubs, which was essential to the recognition of any object as an art treasure. For such purposes as the decoration of kugi-kakushi (metal ornaments used to conceal the heads of nails in the interiors of houses), beads (ōjime) and clasps (kagami-buta or kana-mono) for pouches, recessed handles of sliding-doors, or metal plates and caps on woodwork, vitrifiable pastes, whether translucid or opaque, seemed suitable. The artists employed by the Taikō
- ↑ See Appendix, note 53.
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