OCR Text |
Show The Charm of Oriental Lacquer. Lacquer lias furnished a most valued material for one of the earliest Industrial arts of China, and, though there are no authentic records of Its origin nor of the steps of its early development, the process Is already called an ancient one in a work published in 1387, in the first years of the Ming period, which proves that the art was known in as remote an epoch as the Sung dynasty. The culminating culmi-nating years of its development were reached" in the reign of the Emperor Chien l.ung (173R-95). who greatly encouraged en-couraged its manufacture and had large quantities of lacquered objects made with which to furnish and decorate his palace. After his death the art seems to have declined in merit, and since that time little or nothing of any high artistic value in Chinese lacquer has been accomplished. ac-complished. The Japanese first learned the process from China, but have since brought It to a point of perfection which surpasses the finest productions of the Chinese. In Japan, however, lacquer is applied solely to objects of comparatively small size, while in the Chinese empire it served to decorate screens and panels of tremendous tremen-dous dimensions. Lacquer is divided into two classe? painted and carved lacquer. Both kinds are sometimes inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Ivory, jade, and various semiprecious semi-precious stones. It was in the early seventeenth century, cen-tury, when Holland and Portugal began their trade with the remote east, and more particularly with China, that marvelous mar-velous empire teeming with so many extraordinary ex-traordinary manifestations, that Europe first began to realize the new and vast field of decorative elements which were contained in and revealed to her artists by Oriental art. Henry Coleman Mav in October Scrlbner. |