Box (1800s): Art, History and Details

Box (1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

For the cover designs on writing boxes, Chinese motifs like Mt. Penglai (Horai-zan in Japanese), the island of immortality, remained popular. A landscape with a river, buildings, mountains, trees, and clouds decorates the top of this portable writing box while the inside is embellished with clouds, birds, water, and grasses and offers a space for a tiny ink stone.

Object facts

• Title: Box
• Date: 1800s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Lacquer
• Technique: lacquer
• Dimensions: Overall: 15.5 cm (6 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1974.271

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert P. Schafer

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sŏn, Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.