The Incredible Journey Of This Small Japanese Lacquer Box – The Dog’s life, it’s a small jewelry box that has traveled from Kyoto to Versailles. This small Japanese lacquer box has survived throughout the centuries maintaining its original beauty. Take a look!
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The famous dog shaped lacquer box is one of the most popular objects of the incredible collection of the historical Marie Antoinette personal objects. This small Japanese box is exposed on the exhibition: A Queen’s Treasure from Versailles: Marie-Antoinette’s Japanese Lacquer, at the Getty Center until January 6 of 2019.
This kind of zoomorphic items in Japanese lacquer was highly coveted by collectors during the eighteenth century. The Dog’s life box was Marie-Antoinette’s favorite piece of her entire luxury collection.
In that time the iconic queen used to place the small box on a prominent spot on a table veneered with petrified wood and ornamented with gilt-bronze mounts next to the fireplace, in her private sitting room at Versailles, the royal palace just southwest of Paris.
This was the perfect place to show of its beauty since the visitors would not be able to escape noticing it! I bet that in that era, the queen’s guests would have wondered how such an extraordinary object has made its way to Versailles, as we do right now! The lacquer box has had quite an exciting journey that starts at the place that it was made: Japan.
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The dog-shaped box is a high-quality Japanese lacquerware is originally from Kyoto. During the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, this exquisite jewelry box was for sale to members of the Japanese upper class, like many of the others elements of the queens’ royal collection.
These small lacquer objects were very expensive. Some of the merchants would acquire ensembles from the lacquer workshops and then divide them into individual elements to sell separately abroad. This was probably the case with this dog-shaped box.
Source: A Dog’s Life, from Kyoto to Versailles
