IMPORTANT ET TRÈS RARE CABINET EN LAQUE NOIR PEINT À L'OR, GUI

Marque et époque Longqing (1567-1572), les portes possiblement du XVIIe siècle

Footnotes

PROPERTY FROM A BELGIAN NOBLE COLLECTION
比利時貴族收藏

明隆慶 黑漆描金方角櫃 「大明龍慶御用監製」款 （櫃門或爲十七世紀）

Provenance:
Formerly in the collection of Raymond Pelgrims de Bigard, Comte de Bigard (1875-1955), Chateau de Grand Bigard, Dilbeek, Belgium.
Thence in the family by descent to the present owner.

來源
Raymond Pelgrims de Bigard（1875-1955）伯爵舊藏，大拜哈爾登城堡，迪爾貝克，比利時
後經家族流傳至今

This beautiful lacquer cabinet is one of the earliest dated examples of lacquer-painted furniture made. The mark on the lower back of the cabinet records that it was made during the Longqing period (1567-1572) of the Ming dynasty. The inscription further states that this cabinet was made by the imperial workshops yuyongjian suggesting that it was intended to be placed in the private quarters of the emperor's residence or in an official space in one of the numerous halls of the imperial palace. The five-clawed dragons painted on the sides and around the frame further support this claim as the use of this particular type of dragon was restricted to Imperial wares. Similarly rendered on contemporaneous porcelain and textile, these five-clawed creatures are typical of the ferocious designs of the late Ming period and leave no doubt as to the imperial origins of the piece.

Lacquer wares inscribed with Longqing marks are very rare compared with the abundancy of surviving marked lacquer pieces made during the preceding Jiajing (1522-1566) and subsequent Wanli (1573-1620) periods. We can assume that the highly skilled artisans employed for manufacture of pieces made for the Imperial court of the Jiajing emperor are likely to have continued working under the Longqing and Wanli emperors thereby continuing to apply their technical expertise, skills and decorative repertoire to the works they created. Not surprisingly, the closest related examples of gold-painted lacquer furniture are cabinets dated to the Wanli period. One of these, a large Wanli-marked cabinet painted in the same technique with red and gold dragons amongst scrolling lotus on a black ground is in the collection of the Guimet Museum, Paris, illustrated in Sir Harry Garner, Chinese Lacquer, London, 1979, pl. 144 (Fig. 1). Another example inscribed with a Wanli mark and similarly decorated in shads of gold with striding five-clawed dragon is a pair of chests published in Valrae Reynolds and Yen Fen Pei, Chinese Art from The Newark Museum, New York, 1980, cat.no. 25, pp. 46-47.

The technique of decorating a black or brown lacquer surface with designs in subtle shades of gold and red is just one of several lacquer-working techniques listed by Huang Cheng in his treatise on lacquer, Xiushi lu 髹飾錄 (On Lacquer Decoration) believed to have been compiled first during the Longqing period of the Ming dynasty. Other techniques include carved lacquer, filled lacquer, smooth lacquer, colorful-painted lacquer, painted gold paint, gold lacquer, piled lacquer and inlayed lacquer. However, in the Jiaqing, Longqing and Wanli period, pieces with gold-painted lacquer or painted lacquer decoration are extremely rare and only a handful of examples are known. The majority of known pieces include smaller items such as two small cabinets similarly painted with gold dragons and lotus on a black lacquer ground, published in Hu Desheng (ed.), Collections of the Palace Museum: Painted Furniture, Beijing, 2009, nos.89 and 99, but also large, representative compound cabinets and smaller cabinets such as the present example. In Sir Harry Garner noted that no other painted lacquerware known belonging to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century was as important as these pieces of Imperial furniture. The technique employed in this type of decoration was also complex and according to Garner required several steps and required great skills as the brushstrokes had to be precise. On this cabinet, the quality of the dragons and lotus scroll differs on each side suggesting different artisans were involved. The lacquer surface on all sides of this cabinet displays a consistent craquelure underlining the quality and purity of the original lacquer used.

Unusually, the top and the back of this cabinet are also lavishly decorated, featuring a flowering prunus tree and a flowering camelia, both skilfully rendered in shades of red and gold. This rare feature only appears on a pair of Wanli-marked gold-painted black lacquer cabinets decorated with Buddhist lions amidst lotus scrolls, the back also painted with a large flowering prunus tree, rocks and magpies below a Wanli mark in a horizontal cartouche, sold in Sotheby's Hong Kong, 7 April 2008, lot 1628, the second in Sotheby's London, 4th May 1984, lot 106.

The designs on the sides, top and back of this wonderful cabinet perfectly match designs found on other marked Ming lacquer pieces of furniture and place this cabinet in a rare group of Imperial wares. However, the finely decorated doors of this cabinet depicting ladies and their attendants engaged in leisurely pursuits are a unique feature and do not appear on any other marked piece of Ming painted lacquer furniture. It appears that the quality of the painting and the wonderfully subtle shades and washes of gold and red employed to bring to life the two domestic scenes as well as the consistent surface craquelure match the painting and surfaces on the other sides of the cabinet suggesting that these doors are original to this possibly unique cabinet which is a rare testimony of late Ming lacquer ware.