Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Artistic Japan, Vol. 4: Illustrations and Essays
Plate agi reproduces a fragment of a girdle in figured silk of the seventeenth century.
In the patterns of their girdles, beyond any other article of dress, the Japanese gave rein to their inventive fancy. There is not a topic, ornamental, poetic, or other, which these masters, with their unappeasable thirst for novelty, have not used for the adornment of their 0s The utter absurdity of a subject is not a reason for its exclusion. About ten years ago we saw in Japan a young girl whose girdle owed its ornament to the explosion of a lighted petroleum lamp, which had strewed all parts of the fabric with rents and fragments.
The three objects represented in Plate bad are not umbrella-handles, as might be supposed by some of our ladies who have used them for this purpose; but they are pipe cases - a very familiar article of use in Japan, on which the national art has been exercised with the greatest fancy.
For these the Japanese have employed every imaginable kind of material - wood, bamboo, bone, ivory, shell, bronze, lacquer; assemblages and encrustations of these different substances all have been made to serve in the manufacture of these little articles, of which every one, down to the humblest person, possesses at least one specimen. The artisan took advantage of the inequalities of the wood, the different tones of the ivory and the bone, of gradations of tint, in fine, of the smallest opportunities presented by the first material which came to hand.
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