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Tsuba Hannya


jelda44

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Dear Jiri.

 

I think Pietro was making the point that a tsuba such as this was not made to be used.  There is a saying, "If it hasn't got a seppa dai it was never meant to be used on a sword."  Like every rule in our world there are exceptions but the point remains that these are fundamentally examples of metal art, almost always late in date and many made for the export market at the end of the Meiji period and through the first part of the 20th century.

 

Nothing wrong with that and yours is very pleasing, also these do sometimes command quite high prices, just usually from collectors of Meiji metalwork rather than tsuba collectors.

 

All the best.

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I'd like to add what I find to be an amusing rule of thumb of my own.  The larger the figures on a tsuba the later in date it was made. :glee:

 

With regard to this example the lack of defined seppa-dai doesn't, for me, necessarily denote a piece made not to be mounted but rather the actual composition placement does. While the hair, beautifully engraved as it is, will be covered there remains enough visible to suggest the whole effect, the hand, also very detailed in its rendering, is lost.  Designs encroaching onto the seppa area have been a feature of tsuba from at least the early 17th century so I think the intent of the artist/craftsman is better understood by considering their overall compositional decisions rather than us sticking to rigid rules. Rules the original makers probably didn't know about anyway  :laughing:  ;-)

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Indeed, I was referring to whether the tsuba was meant to ever be mounted on a sword. Apart from the lost decoration, I was wondering if the relief of the hand would prevent the seppa from properly adhering to the surface. But from a closer look at the third picture it seems that the hand is not significantly raised with respect to the background.

 

Cheers, Pietro

 

[apologies in advance if I am not using the correct terminology!]


 

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Jiri,

 

Nice piece - I love shooting those :glee:

 

I don't think these were ever -really- meant to be mounted - think of them as presentation pieces...  Its a little different from, say, the nishigaki guys who sometimes continued their engraving waay into the seppa area, which kind of implied that they were "meant" to be looked at off the sword as well...

 

rkg

(Richard George)

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