Box for personal documents – tebako

The decoration of this box is composed all over the outer panels as a single whole. The lid is adorned with an ideal dramatic landscape with an impressive waterfall, and pine and cherry trees in swaths of mist. The walls of the box feature a landscape composed in a band depicting a stream and footbridge, a village with huts beneath blossoming cherry trees combined with pine and bamboo, rock and patches of mist. The scenery is depicted in simple allusions, in accordance with a time-honoured schema. Despite its superb workmanship, this piece is more suggestive of products commonly made in one of the experienced lacquer manufactories. The container’s inside and bottom are decorated in nashiji technique. (See Filip Suchomel and Marcela Suchomelová: A Surface Created for Decoration, Prague 2002, pp. 258–259)