Dobrovits Aladár szerk.: Az Iparművészeti Múzeum Évkönyvei 5. (Budapest, 1962)

HOPP FERENC MÚZEUM - MUSÉE FERENC HOPP - Major, Gyula: Memorial Exhibition of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts: The Art of Asia

Fig. 2. Japanese inros, lacquered i. e. of a time when industrial arts of the Land of the Rising Sun were still on their height, and foreign influences and above all commercial interests could not stifle the longing for a refined technique and artistic decoration with Japanese masters. In a rather spacious show-case we exhibited Japanese bronze works of various techniques and alloys. The pieces illustrate the principal types of the bronze art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In the show-case facing this group there are the enamelled objects of different times and techniques of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth

. They are objects made with painted and cloisonné techniques. The most attractive part of the Japanese section was the group of the lacquer objects. The most artistic pieces of the Ferenc Hopp-bequest are the hundreds of lacquer works. A large part of them is signed, some by prominent artists. The red lacquers and those of plastic works of this material have formed a special group (two figures of Karashishi from the seventeenth century and an Ebisu on the back of a carp from the nineteenth century). There were also, as a large part of the exhibited objects, those painted in different techniques of gold lacquer, mostly kogos, suzuribakos and sakezukis. Exhibiting these, we wanted to emphasize the endless technical variations of the works in gold lacquer. An inro-collection in two showcases on tables gave an idea of the multifariousness and the striving to ever higher decorative qualities of Japanese lacquer-work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of the cases the fully epuipped inros were exhibited, with netsuke and ojime, in the other one the single inros. Most of these single inros are signed. 9* 131