Japan: Courts and Culture
Telling the story of 400 years of British royal contact with Japan
Table stand
late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuryWood decorated in black and gold lacquer | 14.4 x 30.2 x 30.2 cm (whole object) | RCIN 26012
Circular table stand, with a gilt rim and lobed apron joining four high, incurving feet. Murasaki Shikibu (978–1016) is said to have composed her masterpiece of Japanese literature, the Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), at Ishiyama Temple on Lake Biwa. The gold-sprinkled scene on this table stand shows the temple pavilion on its distinctive supporting beams. The lake was a popular subject for later woodblock print artists producing ‘Eight views of Ōmi’ (now Shiga Prefecture), a series of scenes modelled after the iconic Chinese ‘Eight views of the Xiao and Xiang rivers’. Landscape views such as these dominated export lacquer wares from the early seventeenth century onwards.
This table may be the ‘black and gold Japan tray with four shaped legs’ sent from the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, to Kensington Palace in June 1848. If so, it was probably acquired by George IV. It was later recorded with other Japanese cabinets and stands in the Privy Purse Corridor at Buckingham Palace in 1911.
Text adapted from Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: Volume III and Japan: Courts and Culture (2020)
Probably acquired by George IV. Possibly this or RCIN 26013, answering to this description in the list of items sent from the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, to Kensington Palace in June 1848 is: ‘A black and gold Japan tray with four shaped legs’ (1829A, p. 54).
Recorded in the Privy Purse Corridor at Buckingham Palace in 1911 (BP 1911 IX p.270).
