Another "bought On A Lark" Tsuba

[rkg]

Hi,

 

Sometimes tsuba you think wouldn't be interesting actually are.  They'll never go Juyo, but...

 

This is a piece I bought not too long ago off of yahoo!Japan.  From the mediocre auction pics, the piece looked kind of like saotome work, and the seller claimed that the shiny black inlays were glass.  While it looked kind of gnarly, I thought it would be interesting to get and do some imaging testing on. Here's one of the pics from the seller - I do not own this image and it is presented here for educational purposes only:

 

 

When I got the piece, it turned to be a lot more interesting.

 

The piece measures 91.9 mm(both height and widh) X 4.83mm (T,max) and it weighs 139.6g

 

First off, I believe the base piece is definitely saotome work - you can clearly see weld lines where the place was folded inside of the nakago ana (see 360 image sets below). Second, the "inlays" are definitely not glass.  I put it under the microscope and looked - the surfaces appear to be shiny black lacquer with a fair amount of age to them - it doesn't appear to be turning brown like you see with muromachi/earlier period lacquer, but its getting there, so I'd posit it was added in the what, mid edo period? 

Here's a couple of the microscope images - you can see that it looks like lacquer, and you can also see some of cracks running around most of the filled sukashi - so whatever the sukashi was filled with it is  pretty light (I did a density calculation (you have to love regularly shaped items where you can easily assign volume values to all the lumps bumps and bulges...) and whatever is in there is pretty light - definitely not lead or even glass) and would seem to to have a radically different coefficient of expansion relative to iron to get cracking like that....

 

I think the sukashi/hitsu were done at the same time, and that they are original to the piece, mostly because of the petal design. The saotome group guys made a lot of pieces with some fairly sophisticated design so the tsuba would "dance" in the light (I've posted examples of this before) - in this case side the petals alternates between a convex petal, a sukashi opening, and a concave petal - of course, they all could have been convex and somebody later cut the sukashi and dug out every fourth petal, but...

 

That also makes the original period of manufacture confusing - the kozuka/kogai are kind of a normal shape but they're kind of close to the nakago ana, so maybe the piece was originally Momoyama to early edo period work?  I don't know...
 

And the piece has been lacquered overall as well, so a lot of the "gnarly" mottling is actually where the lacquer is gone in pockmarks.  Its still a bit gnarly, but it seem to be in the interesting places (where your left thumb would go when prepping to draw (about 10-11 o'clock on the front side), etc.

 

(As an aside, the light colored areas on the back and by the kozuka hitsu on the front seem to be some kind of "guck" - I don't know if its lacquer that ended up fading, some kind of adhesive, or something else, but...)

 

I don't know about when that surface lacquer was put on the piece, but I think the filling of the sukashi and the black lacquer over the fills got added later (but still a long time ago).  Anyway, here's a quick front/back side pair of images:

 

 

And, of course, some 360 image sets - you can kind of see the weld lines in the nakago ana on these, but they're a LOT more visible in different light

 

http://www.rkgphotos.com/facebook_stuff/kiku_black_sukashi/glass_kiku_front/glass_kiku_front.html

http://www.rkgphotos.com/facebook_stuff/kiku_black_sukashi/glass_kiku_back/glass_kiku_back.html

 

But as usual, my conclusions can be completely full of it, so other observations are appreciated :-)

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

[Tanto54]

Dear Richard,

 

Thanks for this and similar posts.  I always enjoy what you have to say and almost feel like I have the object in hand because of your fine pictures.

[ChrisW]

Whatever it is, its certainly very pretty! Perhaps a very austere piece of cloisonne?

[John A Stuart]

Seems to me to be a San Diego type kiku tsuba that has been modified with alternating sukashi. John

[Soshin]

Dear Richard,

 

Thank you for the interesting tsuba, great photography, and educational discussion.  I will send you a PM shortly to discuss more about a Katsuchushi tsuba I have in my collection and also discuss the topic of old lacquer.       

 

 

[rkg]

Update:  I -finally- got my shooting setup back together and got to spend some quality time trying to figure out how I'd image this piece.  Its actually an interesting problem to get in one shot.  the above front-on images really give you no idea what those black inserts are -and actually, visually they almost appear to be sukashi, showing the black background.  The problem is that the sukashi fills are shiny, black, mostly flat, and while I could make that very visible, the rest of the surface would kind of vanish/starts looking very dull.  Here's an example showing a few potential variants.  The image I put up earlier is in the upper left corner:

 

 

I thought this one was the best compromise between surface detail of the tsuba, showing the surface details of the insets, etc.  I could probably try some other things, but...  In this case I chose to blow out few parts of some of the lacquer work so you could see typical details - you can only show so much in one image w/o resorting to compositing things together, which starts looking kind of un-natural really quickly.

 

I also like how when you look at the larger images with good lighting you can immediately see what you almost can't in hand.  The piece apparently had the sukashi filled with what pitch (that light brown stuff you see poking through), and its also obvious whoever did it wasn't too careful (you can see goobers of it on the back).

 

Haynes thought this modification was much later than the piece.  As an aside, here's another image of the lacquer - while there's a crack through it at the iron/pitch interface, note that there is no crazing or other artifacts, which is consistent with what I'd expect from late edo lacquerwork...

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

[Greg F]

Wow Richard, I always enjoy your work on youtube and Nmb. The educational stuff makes it even better. Thanks vey much.

 

Greg

[zanilu]

Richard

 

I have just found this on the net:

 

https://blog.goo.ne.jp/onikuma1210/e/e1b885f0c440b8009341e70a3853244d

 

Luca

[rkg]

Luca,

 

thanks for passing that along (!)  yeah, that's what I believe the piece kind of looked like originally, though the one above I think is actually more sophisticated visually, due to the maker introducing an "innie" and "outie" into the surface profile of the petals tto introduce visual motion as light would move across the piece (something the saotome guys did a lot of). Here's a snarfed image from the sale above for posterity - I do not own the copyright and it is being presented for educational purposes only:
 

 

And the piece is interesting in its own right.  The seem to be calling it umetada/ko-umetada, I guess due to the nunome on soft metal - but the sukashi seems poorly done for them (kind of off center here and there with wavy lines, etc) - I wonder if the sukashi are ato bori or something.

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

[Kurikata]

A variation mix of heianjo zogan . No idea about the school....In my opinion the suaka plugs are original to the tsuba.