Seal Box

This is a seal box made with zitan wood. Its cover is carved with a dragon and pearl while the sides show facing dragons. Zitan is valued due to it being the hardest and heaviest of the hardwoods and a reliable material for Chinese decorative arts.

Lacquerware was typically produced in government-sponsored workshops, though this was not always the case. In times of economic prosperity, the commercial workshops of southern China, particularly the southeastern provinces of the Song and Yuan periods (13th-14th century) and the late Ming era (1368-1644), were innovative in their approaches to creating lacquer items. Lacquer items from the Qing palace workshops were, at first, carved by craftsmen capable of overcoming the difficulties of lacquer carving due to their experience carving bamboo and ivory. However, the rapid political and economic decline of the Qing Dynasty following the reign of Qianlong (1735-1796) resulted in the closing down of many palace workshops, and the lacquer items made afterwards were fewer and had diminished in quality.

Hutt, Julia. Understanding Far Eastern Art: A Complete Guide to the Arts of China, Japan and Korea - Ceramics, Sculpture, Painting, Prints, Lacquer, Textiles and Metalwork. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987.

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. Sculpted Stories: Selected Works from the Fred Freund Collection. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, n.d.

Watt, James C. Y., and Barbara Brennan Ford. East Asian Lacquer: The Florence and Herbert Irving Collection. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.