All about East Asian lacquer and japanned furniture

From about 1600 Dutch and English merchants also became involved in the trade with East Asia. They initially bought namban lacquer, and substantial numbers of objects in that style can still be found in northern European collections. But in the course of the seventeenth century the decoration of Japanese export lacquer became less dense and more pictorial, showing birds and flowers or landscapes. In the Dutch Republic, Amalia von Solms, Princess of Orange, used Japanese lacquer in a rather brutal but creative way in the 1650s, taking lacquer screens and coffers apart to panel a room at Huis ten Bosch, on the outskirts of The Hague.

Lacquered tables in Rita Konig’s farmhouse in County Durham

Paul Massey

In the later seventeenth century, a particular type of Chinese lacquer also became popular in Europe. Nowadays often called ‘Coromandel’ lacquer, after the Indian coastal region via which it was shipped to Europe, this was black lacquer into which images were engraved that were filled with various pigments, to create a luminously colourful effect. Many historic European houses still feature large Coromandel lacquer screens. But by now European artisans were copying East-Asian lacquer, sometimes loosely, sometimes very meticulously. In England John Stalker and George Parker published a ‘how to’ manual in 1688, entitled A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing – ‘japanning’ being their evocative term for lacquering. The detailed ‘recipes’ in the book show how British artisans were recreating the effects of East-Asian lacquer using quite different materials. And English and Dutch leather workers were creating hangings and folding screens in painted and gilded leather reproducing the appearance of Coromandel lacquer.

From 1693 the Dutch East India trading company stopped buying Japanese lacquer, because its high cost made it unprofitable. Chinese artisans took this opportunity to begin to produce slightly more affordable lacquer, in a pseudo-Japanese gold-on-black style. During the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century Chinese lacquer screens, bureaux, cabinets and tables remained popular with Westerners. But lacquer – or rather ‘japanning’ – also became an important component of British furniture-making. A tradition evolved of English pseudo-Asian or ‘chinoiserie’ furniture, borrowing certain Asian shapes and motifs such as cabriole legs and geometric fretwork, and also involving brightly coloured lacquer decoration with fantastical ‘oriental’ imagery. The cabinet maker Giles Grendey made a large group of red-japanned pieces of furniture for the Spanish Duke of Infantado, while Thomas Chippendale is also known to have produced lacquered furniture in various colours.