Description On a square base with cabriole feet, surmounted by a slender shaft and a tapering body with a stepped lid lifting vertically, covered all over with black lacquer with faux-fluting and flower sprays inlaid in aogai, and flower and vase panels in hiramakie on the straight border of the lid. Lock plate of silver, the interior lined with green velvet. Restorations, especially to the edges of the lid, feet replaced. These Neo-Classical style cutlery urns - often appearing in pairs - enjoyed great popularity in Europe and the United States, as evidenced by the number of pieces in museum collections and circulating in the trade. For example, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford houses an urn inscribed with the name of Kiyotomo, others are in the Royal Trust Collection, the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. and the Kyûshu National Museum in Daizafu. In the last years of the eighteenth century the Dutch East India Company started to charter American ships in order to ensure that they would be able to send the correct number of vessels to Nagasaki each year in accordance with their exclusive agreement with the Japanese authorities. The first of these ships, the Eliza of New York, was wrecked in 1797, but another ship, the Franklin of Salem, made it to Japan in 1799, reaching Nagasaki on 19 July. The personal account books of the Captain of the Franklin, James Devereux, record that he brought back a considerable quantity of lacquer, all of it apparently in contemporary European shapes, including `22 lacked knife boxes` (Charles H.P. Copeland, `Japanese export furniture`, in: Antiques, LXVI, July 1954, pp. 50-1); some of these might have been knife-cases like those, in the shape fashionable in about 1770, in the Clive collection at Powis Castle (Mary Archer and others, Treasures from India: The Clive Collection at Powis Castle, London, 1987, cat. no. 193), but others were most likely knife-urns like the present example. Another American vessel, the Margaret, visited Nagasaki in 1801 and her co-owner and Captain, Samuel Gardner Derby, is known to have acquired a Japanese knife-urn that is now preserved in the Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Regarding the Sasaya workshop and the wood turner Kiyotomo from the Sanjo-Teramachi district in Kyoto see Oliver Impey, Sasaya Kisuke, Kyoto `Nagasaki` Lacquer and the woodworker Kiyotomo, in: Oriental Art, vol. XLIV, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 28-32)尺寸_1: Dimensions Height 74.5 cm出处: Provenance Private collection, Rhineland文献: Literature Illustrated in: Antje Papist Matsuo, Brückenschlag von Ost nach West, Japanischer Exportlack aus vier Jahrhunderten, Ausstellungskatalog, Museum für Lackkunst Münster, 2016, p. 106-107, no. 34