NAMIKAWA YASUYUKI (1845-1927) A Fine Cloisonné-Enamel Jar and Cover Meiji era (1868-1912), circa 1900Property of various ownersNAMIKAWA YASUYUKI (1845-1927)A Fine Cloisonné-Enamel Jar and Cover Meiji era (1868-1912), circa 1900Worked in silver wire and polychrome enamels against a black ground with a continuous scene of butterflies alighting on stands of chrysanthemum, the shoulder and domed cover decorated with flowering vines and surmounted with a silver flower-bud finial, the foot with a floral-lozenge band, signed on a silver tablet Kyōto Namikawa 3 3/4in (9.5cm) highProvenanceGeorge E. McGague, purchased in Kyoto from Namikawa Yasuyuki in April 1903, and thence by descentNot only are these three lots outstanding examples of cloisonné enamel from the Kyoto workshops of Namikawa Yasuyuki at the height of his worldwide renown, carefully preserved family records allow us to trace the journey to Japan of their original owners, George E. McGague of the Carnegie Steel Company, his wife, his son, and his two daughters (one of whom, Anna, kept a diary). Their trip west from Pittsburgh to Japan, evidently in celebration of McGague's impending retirement (in 1904), started in earnest at Pasadena and continued by way of the Pacific Mail steamship S.S. Siberia which left San Francisco on Saturday, March 11, 1903 and arrived off Yokohama seventeen days later.The family were greeted by a pre-booked guide, Kobe Tajima, and they were soon busy enjoying themselves around Yokohama, where they shopped for "... cloisonné, ivories, silks, and curios" and Kamakura, where they took in the famous Daibutsu, a gigantic seated bronze figure of Amida Buddha; a hand-colored photograph from the famous Yokohama studio of Kusakabe Kinbei shows Mr. and Mrs. McGague in Japanese garb, gamely seated on the floor in the Japanese manner enjoying cups of tea. By April 12 the McGagues were on their way to Kyoto where " ... we found the finest cloisonné, silk embroideries and bronzes we have seen, and it is generally conceded that the leading artists in Japan in these lines are here." They were also among the more than four million visitors to the fifth and last National Industrial Exposition, which had opened in nearby Osaka on March 1.As a measure of their enthusiasm for collecting, Kobe Tajima's final accounts reveal that the McGagues' purchases cost twice as much as all the other expenses of the trip combined. We can only imagine what their reception at Namikawa's premises might have been like but the master's marketing strategy can be closely followed for a period of fifteen years or so by studying newspaper articles and travel books from 1891 through to the writings of Herbert Ponting and others in 1903 and 1904, the very same time that the McGagues were in Kyoto.Namikawa would guide his visitors through the garden with its islets and golden carp and on to the workshops which he presented as a place of creative freedom that contrasts with the orderly scenes in Ponting's photographs. As Ponting drily observed, " ... his artists do not work by set hours, but only when the mental inspiration and desire for work is upon them. As this, however, is practically all day every day I have seldom ... found a vacant place on the tables in the workroom" (Herbert G. Ponting, In Lotus-Land Japan, London, Macmillan, 1910, p. 65).Small wonder, then, that the McGague family was enchanted and George was persuaded by Namikawa to make generous use of his pocketbook. It is interesting to note that one of his purchases, the rare faceted incense burner (lot 929), is five or more years earlier in date than the other two, indicating that Namikawa held on to some of his older production until the right customer came to his carefully cultivated enamel paradise.