Tea Caddy (Chaire) (1500s): Art, History and Details

Tea Caddy (Chaire) (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Negoro is a lacquer technique, named after the Negoro temple in Japan, in which several layers of red lacquer are applied over a black lacquer undercoating. Through years of handling, a natural surface of red and black random patterns emerges, an aesthetic highly prized by the Japanese.

Object facts

• Title: Tea Caddy (Chaire)
• Date: 1500s
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Lacquer
• Technique: Negoro lacquer on wood
• Dimensions: Diameter: 11 cm (4 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1988.56

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R. The Triumph of Japanese Style: 16th-Century Art in Japan. Cleveland, OH: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1991.

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.