context: lacquerwork > artists

Toyo Iizuka,
active late 18th C

The thing that makes Toyo Iizuka worth highlighting is the story of his appointment by a daimyo - and indeed he was given samurai status by him. He was asked to decorate the daimyo's shoes with lacquerwork, and refused on the basis that having his work walked on would dishonour it. This implies interesting things about the status of lacquerworkers, even if it is apocryphal. His best work used subtle effects where parts of the image would be obscured by other layers of lacquer so the inro would look very different in different lights. Sadly, this is rather hard to capture here.

backwards: ogawa haritsu

forwards: shibata zeshin