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Lot Essay
The japanned decoration on this cabinet is a great example of the fashion for Chinoiserie, which dates back to the seventeenth century, when European travelers brought back tales and engravings of the exotic sights they had seen in the 'Orient'. English and Dutch influences reached Germany in the late 1600s through the importation of Chinese and Japanese lacquer and porcelain as well as their European copies, and found their way to the mainly protestant north German centers of Hamburg, Bremen and Brunswick and the courts of Saxony and Brandenburg/Prussia.
While European lacquered pieces were most often executed in black or red, German lacquerers often used less-common colors, such as pinks, blue, yellow and white. This highly decorative cabinet is distinguished by the white ground and the delicate quality of its lacquer decoration. White lacquer was only occasionally produced in Japan, both for export and for the home market and European 'Japanners' too mostly used black or red grounds with gilt or polychrome decoration. It was a distinctive feature of North German lacquer workers oeuvre to use a white ground on which the decoration was built up in blue or bright polychrome colors and partially gilt, recreating a porcelain-like appearance. For another spectacular cabinet with this type of decoration in the Getty Collection, see lot 33 in the Evening Sale.
The cabinet was fashioned similarly to a seventeenth-century Japanese export lacquer cabinet, with small drawers behind two doors, adapting it to the needs of a contemporaneous medal collector. Due to its excellent state of conservation, this lot is a prime example of a remarkable group of white-ground-japanned objects and can be listed in a group with a similarly decorated harpsichord at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, and a cabinet, also dated circa 1710, in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, see W. Holzhausen, Lackkunst in Europa, Braunschweig, 1959, ills. 132-3 and 142-3, among others. The blue border on the doors decorated with a gilt trellis and flower-filled reserves closely relates this cabinet to a white-lacquered Chinoiserie cabinet of Hamburg manufacture, now in the Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo, see H. Huth, Lacquer of the West, Chicago, 1971, fig. 152.
While European lacquered pieces were most often executed in black or red, German lacquerers often used less-common colors, such as pinks, blue, yellow and white. This highly decorative cabinet is distinguished by the white ground and the delicate quality of its lacquer decoration. White lacquer was only occasionally produced in Japan, both for export and for the home market and European 'Japanners' too mostly used black or red grounds with gilt or polychrome decoration. It was a distinctive feature of North German lacquer workers oeuvre to use a white ground on which the decoration was built up in blue or bright polychrome colors and partially gilt, recreating a porcelain-like appearance. For another spectacular cabinet with this type of decoration in the Getty Collection, see lot 33 in the Evening Sale.
The cabinet was fashioned similarly to a seventeenth-century Japanese export lacquer cabinet, with small drawers behind two doors, adapting it to the needs of a contemporaneous medal collector. Due to its excellent state of conservation, this lot is a prime example of a remarkable group of white-ground-japanned objects and can be listed in a group with a similarly decorated harpsichord at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, and a cabinet, also dated circa 1710, in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, see W. Holzhausen, Lackkunst in Europa, Braunschweig, 1959, ills. 132-3 and 142-3, among others. The blue border on the doors decorated with a gilt trellis and flower-filled reserves closely relates this cabinet to a white-lacquered Chinoiserie cabinet of Hamburg manufacture, now in the Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo, see H. Huth, Lacquer of the West, Chicago, 1971, fig. 152.