Galerie Zacke
Lot 545
A SUPERB ARTIST SIGNED WOVEN RATTAN KISERUZUTSU AND A SANSUKUMI NETSUKE, MEIJIJapan, Meiji period (1868-1912) or slightly later The pipe case of muso-zutsu type, the woven ground lacquered in black, silver and gold takamaki-e with leafy vines, the lower end with a snail. The neck mount with a silvered metal loop, the reverse with the artist signature in gold lacquer on a circular, black-lacquered reserve. Together with a resin netsuke, showcasing a snake coiled atop a straw hat (kasa), underneath the hat a large frog is hiding. Natural himotoshi through an opening in the hat, the top with two further holes. Condition: Good condition with some wear, tiny nicks, and tiny losses to the lacquer. Provenance: The Strong National Museum of Play, accession number 77/039.a (lacquered to the underside of the kiseruzutsu) and 77.10995 (lacquered to the underside of the netsuke). Margaret Woodbury Strong (1897-1969) grew up in a prosperous family of collectors. Her interests ranged so widely that by 1960 she had amassed more than 27,000 collectible items and works of art. The vast majority of her collections related in some way to play and as her accumulation grew, Margaret planned a museum to house her collection. It eventually opened to the public in 1982, and grew dramatically over the following decades, expanding its collections, facilities, and resources, now spanning over 285,000 square feet. Today, the Strong National Museum of Play (known as just The Strong Museum or simply The Strong) is the only collections-based museum in the world devoted solely to the study of play. Dimensions: Length 21.5 cm The combination of snake, frog, and snail (or slug) constitutes the sansukumi motif. Sansukumi translates to 'the three who are afraid of one another'. The three animals are in a state of mutually assured destruction: the snake will consume the frog, however the frog has already eaten a poisonous snail, so the snake must perish as well. This motif is connected to sansukumi-ken, a category of Japanese hand games played by using three hand gestures. The oldest sansukumi-ken game is mushi-ken, a game originally from China. In mushi-ken, the 'frog' represented by the thumb wins against the 'slug' represented by the pinkie finger, which, in turn defeats the 'snake' represented by the index finger, which wins against the 'frog'. Although this game was imported from China, the Japanese version differs in the animals represented. In adopting the game, the original Chinese characters for centipede or millipede were apparently confused with the characters for the 'slug'. The centipede was chosen because of the Chinese belief that the centipede could kill a snake by climbing and entering its head. One of the few surviving sansukumi-ken games is jan-ken, which was brought to the West in the 20th century as rock-paper-scissors.
