Lacquer-Ware
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
articles of wood or metal ornamented by a coating of lacquer, or varnish containing lac. The Chinese, Japanese, and Burmese are skillful makers of lacquer-ware. The Japanese in particular excel in making fancy boxes for the toilet table, trays, napkin rings, placques, fans, brushes, combs, and other articles. The lac, which is obtained from the lac sumac, is dissolved in spring water. Gold, mercury, or some other pigment is added to impart color. When applied to the surface of wood it gives a smooth, highly lustrous color. Gold and silver figures may be traced on a black background. Many rich combinations, as red and vermilion over black, are produced. The effect may be heightened by means of inlaid pearl, ivory, both plain and colored, and by small plates of polished metal. Cranes, scrolls, flowers, sprays, human figures, and a hundred other patterns are employed in high class work. As high as fifteen coats are applied, forming an incrustation in such a case, perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness. Lacquer finish is so hard that it is difficult to scratch it, and it takes the most perfect finishing polish known. Although the term is applied usually to woodwork, metal work, particularly brass work, may be lacquered to advantage. The brass must be hot when the finishing material is applied. In addition to art work, ordinary articles of furniture are finished with a durable, hard ordinarily black lacquer, ornamented with gold designs. The wood of this sumac or lacquer tree, from which lac is obtained, takes a perfect finish and is much used in lacquer work.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The craft Aiton's described in 1910 is still made much as it was, layer on painstaking layer, and a Japanese lacquer box of that date would be produced by recognisably the same methods today. What has been sorted out is the chemistry the 1910 account garbles: true East Asian lacquer is not "lac" at all but the sap of the lacquer tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum (once Rhus verniciflua), whose active compound urushiol is the same irritant found in poison ivy, so that raw lacquer raises a rash on unaccustomed workers. Shellac, the resin of the lac insect, is a wholly separate substance, and the confusion of the two was common in English writing of the period. Since 1910 archaeologists have pushed lacquer's history in China back thousands of years before the Han pieces then known, Japan has protected its best lacquerers under the postwar cultural-properties system, and most "lacquer" sold in the West is now synthetic or cashew-shell varnish rather than urushi.
Written for this edition, 2026.