Zeshin: The Catherine and Thomas Edson Collection

Shibata Zeshin (1807-189) was one of the most unusual Japanese artists of the nineteenth century. Not only did he achieve almost equal fame as a painter of silk or paper scrolls and as a lacquerer of boxes and trays, something no one had done before, he even invented a type of "lac-quer painting" (urushi-e)—well represented in the Edson Collection (nos. 44-53) —that enabled him to combine both of those ancient arts. He devised a host of other new lacquer techniques and deployed them on a wide array of objects to create a visual world so distinctive that there is normally no need to search for his tiny signature, often scratched with a rat's tooth in the dark sur-face. He is unusual, too, not just for his artistic singularity but also for the skewed chronological spread of his output. Although we know a good deal about the techniques he invented during the 1840s and we have a few records of commissions carried out in the same decade, apparently only a handful of his surviving works predate 1868, the last year of the Edo period (1615-1868) and the first of the Meiji era (1868-1912). His reputation rests, therefore, on lacquerware, paintings, and lacquer paintings executed during the last quarter century of his life, when Japan experienced some of the most profound and far-reaching changes in her long history.