Carving: Libation Cup

Libation cups of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) were treasured items for interior design, particularly for the scholar's desk layout. The Song Dynasty (960-1279) established the concept of the "four treasures" (inkstone, ink, brush, and paper) of a scholar's study which became an appreciated facet of desk decoration, fomenting an appreciation of the desk's additional items for interested consumers. Some of the other items included brush pots, wrist rests, scroll pots, and desk screens. In general, Chinese libation cups have been carved from Rhinoceros horn.

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.

The carving technique of Chinese lacquer, due to the complicated drying process, was not perfected until relatively late in history. The raw lacquer sap taken from the rhus tree species, particularly Rhus verniciflua, would not harden if applied too thickly, which meant that lacquer painting required a lengthy layering technique. Carved items of the commonly-used red lacquer style (ti hong) were not created until the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), and the lacquer manufacturing procedures are recorded for both the Yuan and early Ming periods. A wooden base was covered with a thick layer of black lacquer (mixed with ash to promote hardening) which served as a smooth surface for the additional layers. A mixture of red and yellow layers, usually between 100 to 200, were then applied, and the artist then carved into these layers to produce a desired design. In order to indicate when the artist had to stop carving, several black layers would have been added as markers at an earlier point of the layering process.

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.