Netsuke in Boston

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

It has long been said that like many accessories, netsuke was born of necessity. These ornaments were originally made to provide a way to secure tobacco cases, purses, or inro (medicine containers), which fashionable Japanese men suspended on silk cords at their waists starting about 1700. Netsuke were fashioned from exquisitely carved ivory, horn, amber, or boxwood and sometimes embellished with gold or silver. They represented deities, mythical creatures, imaginary beasts, and recognizable fauna imbued with symbolic meanings. Netsuke are usually two or three inches in height.

Joe Earle has recently written that netsuke might originally have been conceived as small sculptures that could even have been used as paperweights, but which were considered first and foremost as sculptural objects to be contemplated as works of art. To buttress his theory he asserts that many examples show little sign of wear, and the silk cord that passed through the hole drilled through a netsuke could just have easily been knotted around an obi without the need for a netsuke. Additionally, the hole is always drilled so as not to disfigure the carving, even at the cost of suspending the netsuke more awkwardly from the obi. Perhaps these tiny objects could have had a dual function both as pieces to be worn in public and in private to be enjoyed as works of art.

An exhibition of nearly four hundred of these enchanting objects is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston until March 10, 2002. Joe Earle, the guest curator, presents his theories in the excellent catalogue that accompanies the show It is entitled Netsuke: Fantasy and Reality in Japanese Miniature Sculpture.

The earliest netsuke were carved in Osaka and Kyoto, but in the late eighteenth century many were made in Edo and in other sophisticated regions of Japan. The craft flourished until about the 1860s and 1870s, when traditional dress was on the wane. Carvers were influenced by illustrations found not in pattern books but in reference works such as the well-known Wakan sansai zue (an illustrated Japanese-Chinese encyclopedia, published in 1716).

The aim of the exhibition was to include more pieces made before the nineteenth century in Osaka and Kyoto and fewer pieces made in Edo. It is also one of the first exhibitions to try to link netsuke to the pictures from which they might have been drawn.