Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/371



It has been held by many critics that lacquered objects stand highest among the products of Japan's applied art, first because the quality of the lacquer as to hardness, durability, and lustre, is unparalleled, and secondly because the decorative genius of her artists has been exercised in this field with most conspicuous success and with marked independence of foreign influence. Certainly the lustre of Japanese lacquer appeals to the least educated eye, so much so that a box or tray of fine black lacquer without ornamentation of any sort possesses an indescribable charm, and tempts the spectator not merely to gaze at it, but also to feel and caress it. Durability and hardness, too, though they are not qualities that enter into a normal estimate of beauty, have much to do with the artistic developments of Japanese lacquer, for had it not possessed these attributes, it could never have been considered worthy of the magnificent and costly decoration lavished upon it. It resists the action of boiling liquids and of alcohol, so that a lacquered cup can be used for tea, for soup, for hot sake, and in fact for all table purposes, being in that respect equal to porcelain, while it is superior to porcelain in security against fracture and in non-conducting properties. There are now standing in the Tokyo Museum of Arts specimens of lacquer which, having lain at the bottom of the sea for some years in a sunken steamer, were found, when recovered, to still retain much of their original beauty. And in the collections of Japanese connoisseurs there are numbers of lacquered objects many centuries old, which have withstood all