SHIBATA ZESHIN (1807-1891) An Important Gold, Silver, and Black Lacquer Panel Gakumen (Panel) Meiji era (1868-1912), dated 1887 (2)SHIBATA ZESHIN (1807-1891)An Important Gold, Silver, and Black Lacquer Panel Gakumen (Panel) Meiji era (1868-1912), dated 1887A rectangular panel constructed from a single piece of wood reinforced with textile and two crosspieces applied to the reverse, depicting a lone crow on a pond or river bank, to the right a rocky outcrop, below and on the outcrop snow-laden grasses, a few snow crystals on the ground and flying away to the left, the design executed over the highly polished black lacquer roiro ground in a range of Zeshin's most idiosyncratic techniques in addition to traditional hiramaki-e, togidashi maki-e and takamaki-e, including gold and silver sabiage made from a mixture of raw lacquer with powder from grindstone powder and crushed charcoal, here worked in high relief and embellished with crushed shell, mist rising from the bank and water indicated by very finely sprinkled silver powder, the crow's tongue in dark-red lacquer; signed in gold hiramaki-e at lower right Hachijuichi-o Zeshin (Zeshin, aged 81), followed by a version of the character nuno (cloth) much used in his signatures at this period; with a modern wood storage box. 36cm x 71.5cm (14 1/8in x 28 1/8in). (2).Provenance:Sakamoto Goro Collection, Kyoto.A Royal Collection.Published:Goke Tadaomi, Shibata Zeshin meihinshu: Bakumatsu kaikaki no shikko kaiga (Lacquer and Painting in Late Edo and Early Meiji: A Collection of Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin), Tokyo, Gakushu Kenkyusha, 1981, cat. no.118.This is one of several celebrated works demonstrating the artist's masterful depiction of crows, those characteristic Edo/Tokyo birds that fascinated both Zeshin and his contemporary Kawanabe Kyosai (as seen in the current exhibition of the latter at the Royal Academy, London). Other examples, in a range of media, include a maki-e box in Tokyo National Museum with an Escher-esque design of crows and egrets (bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/558743); an urushi-e painting of two crows in the Misumi Collection, published in Nezu Bijutsukan, Shibata Zeshin no shippo, urushi, kaiga (Shibata Zeshin: From Lacquer Arts to Painting), exh. cat., Tokyo, 2012, cat. no.120; and in lacquer on wood, as with the present lot, a panel of a crow on a fruiting branch of biwa (loquat) in the same catalogue as the urushi-e painting, cat. no.54, preserved in the Ako City Tabuchi Museum of Art, Hyogo Prefecture. The 1880s were a period of peak production for Zeshin's pictorial lacquer panels that seek to emulate the format of framed Western oils, including, for example one that depicts vegetables mourning the death of the Buddha, executed in 1888 and purchased by industrial titan Iwasaki Yanosuke and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: accession number 2008.1413.