Be Still My Heart

[Stephen]

[Greg F]

Wow thats absolutely stunning Stephen! Cheers.

 

Greg

[Gordon Sanders]

That is beautiful. Want!!

[Brian]

If your heart be still.....do I get that Gendaito?

:rotfl:

[SAS]

Oh my, are you kidding? Please say you will leave that to me when the spaceship arrives......

[Ford Hallam]

Hagia Katsuhira! I know his work   in the MFA if memory serves.

[Brian]

Ford, you should see if you can try to duplicate one of his tsuba sometime. :rotfl:

[Stephen]

I wish i had keep the page i lifted it from on FB, tried to find again with no luck ...ill never know if it was a avy or for sale or what....oh well i dont think i could afford it. The neat thing of it was i seen it right after my son came in showing the outline of his new sleeve 

 

Dragon and Tiger oh my

[Ford Hallam]

Stephen

 

it's in the Museum of Fine Art, Boston (MFA) you'll find it in their on-line collection, over 3000 pieces of tosogu available for study and with excellent enlargements available too.

Here's a link

 

Or click on this image to see a much bigger version.

Images like this ought by now to be standard quality for tosogu reference books. In some respects the subject is easier to study in images like this than having the pieces in hand.

 

Brian, where the challenge in that? Unless someone wanted to make a film of it....not! But to put it in to context I'd estimate around 12 weeks of work.

[Brian]

I don't want to hijack the thread, but since I am not sure if anything can be added to that, I was wondering Ford....

Way back, when the very high end tsuba makers like Natsuo and Joi and Katsuhira and Omori etc etc were working on a tsuba like this one, or something else...I assume it would have taken many week's worth of work. Would they have been working on multiple, different projects at the same time, or would they have focused on one main project?

Just curious. I assume they couldn't make a living by doing one work over 3 months, but how many simultaneous works would have been practical?

[Stephen]

Thats not hijacking thats learning !!!

[Ford Hallam]

Brain, we don't really have all that much period literature to form really detailed pictures of workshop practice...and I've been digging. I do think we may yet find useful material in time though.

 

I think that given the many different schools and characters there may have been a variety of approaches. But we can be fairly sure that the work was handled by a number of different hands throughout it's creation. Just as in the famous painters studios in Europe from Mediaeval times at least. The notion, and importance, of the 'sole author' is a relatively new one in the history of applied art. I suspect even when the master was focussed on an important commission the studio would continue to keep making the 'bread and butter' work to keep the business going. Repair work would have been part of the business as was teaching classes for amateurs. Incidentally, that's a new area of research for me but it's looking quite interesting and might alter how we view unsigned pieces in future.

 

Many of the big names were on retainers though, so earning weekly wages was not quite the rat race it is for us today. In fact there was some competition among wealthy daimyo and merchants to secure the services of the most popular artists so we can easily imagine how lucrative arrangements were made that did allow artists to really achieve ever more impressive results. And that, of course, was the whole point of commissioning new work, to impress.

[Brian Ayres]

Goto Ichijo wrote about his gratitude...He also talked about his economic worries, saying, "I am leading a hand-to-mouth life"

 

These excerpts are from Rokusho Vol.3 Impact on Art Nouveau Metalworks in Late Edo and Meiji Period.

[Brian]

I guess that is something that we tend to forget about: The fact that while they were working and creating masterpieces and trying to earn a living, they also had to keep the tradition alive by teaching the next generation. Not every commission would have a student peeking over his shoulder, so there must have been considerable time set aside for lessons, all while trying to get new orders and run the "shop"
Much the same as today I guess. We tend to think of these guys as slaving all day over a tsuba, but there must have been a great deal of other things going on at the same time.

Interesting to consider.
 

[Ford Hallam]

Brian Ayres' reference to Ichigo's personal struggles actually bring to the fore yet another facet as yet unexamined by the conservative tosogu community.

 

We're told that Ichijo is the last master of the Goto line and that somehow he revived the School's reputation. The actual social and economic realities would seem to contradict that story.

On the other side of the conversation Katsuoshi was doing remarkably well. In fact of all the artists who where really born of the Edo period tosogu tradition Katsuyoshi was probably the most successful artist in terms of making the transition from tosogu to export  objet d' art. The letters between Ichijo and Katsuyoshi reveal the profound differences in the way the older generation and the younger artists dealt with the changing times.

 

Neither Kano Natsuo nor Hagia Katsuhira struggled to keep working or selling their wares. In fact there are a number of artists who kept alive to current trends and sold work directly to American collectors who then donated the work to the MFA in Boston. As did a handful of senior Mito artists who were able to recognise and express the desired aesthetic of the period.

 

What I'm alluding to is the versatility of machibori as opposed to the rigidity inherent in the iebori.  As Japan opened up to the modern world the Machibori artists were recruited by government sponsored companies to produce the amazing export ware that the Meiji period was famous for. Perhaps the political alignment of the Iebori schools with the old Shogunate also made then less approachable by the rapidly modernising merchant/common classes. But within 60 years no thread of either tradition was still alive.