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The Realm of Lacquer

In 1854, after more than 200 years of isolation, Japan reopened its ports to western trade and in so doing provided a fresh source of artistic inspiration to the West. Japanese furniture which came into the European market was praised for its simplicity, purity of form and strong feeling for nature. In a reaction against ornate historical eighteenth-century furniture styles, British designers tried to capture the spirit of the East with its use of lacquered wood finish and an emphasis on structural design. Functional elements such as hinges and key plates became decorative. In England tastes were also being defined by Liberty department store, which became a major outlet for artistic items when it was opened by Arthur Lazenby Liberty (1843-1917) in Regent Street in May 1875. His talent for acquiring tasteful objet d’art from Japan and the East was noted by the furniture designer E.W. Godwin (1833-1886) with Godwin describing the excitement of Liberty’s customers when a new shipload of goods arrived on the pavement outside the Regent Street shop. This atmosphere was so intense that customers, ecstatic over the silks, fans, rugs, china and enamelware, would demand that the packing cases be opened in the street. This combined with the influence of the Aesthetic Movement compounded the Anglo-Japanese style which developed in the period from 1851-1900. The Museum of Ornamental Art (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) bought Japanese lacquer and porcelain in 1852 and in 1854. In 1875-1897 The National Museum of Ireland had acquired a number of Japanese items, notably lacquer pieces which were displayed in Kildare Street in Dublin. Articles appeared in The Irish Times regarding these exhibits from 1885 through to 1890. Gray spent her childhood between London’s South Kensington and Enniscorthy in Wexford. Recorded in her archives are day trips spent in Dublin with her mother where it is possible that she saw some of these pieces.

4.1 Eileen Gray, 1896, black and white photograph © NMI

4.2 Eileen Gray, late 1910s, early 1920s, black and white photograph © NMI

Gray was also exceedingly interested in the Aesthetic, Decadent and Symbolist movements having a number of key publications in her library. These movements emphasised the use of symbols, sensuality and the correspondence between words, colours and music, which defined Gray’s ideas of synaesthesia. Lacquer was an ideal medium which encompassed all of these movement’s ideas of engaging with the senses, providing the user with a refined sensuous pleasure. It was a craft whereby touch and sight were actively engaged from the beginning of the creative process through to the end result.

4.3 Room installation, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, James McNeill Whistler, 1876-1877, oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, Gift of Charles Lang Freer

By the 1880s the Anglo-Japanese style had become a major influence in these movements culminating in Whistler’s Peacock Room.¹ Gray owned The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 1908.² In this publication Gray saw images and read the story behind the commission for Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room – Whistler’s masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He had painted the panelled room in a rich and unified palette of scintillating blue-greens with an over-glazing of metallic gold leaf. Painted in 1876-77 the interior became an example of the Anglo-Japanese style. The mural decoration of this room dominated the architectural interior and its features. Gray’s instinctive reaction against the luxury and exuberance of the room would culminate in her eventual conviction that ‘architecture must be its own decoration’.³ However Whistler’s palette in The Peacock Room would later reappear in Gray’s lacquer work from 1908 onwards, as she strove to faithfully create and perfect the recipe for blue lacquer.

While attending the Slade School in London in 1900 Gray serendipitously encountered the medium of lacquer.⁴ During her lunch hour Gray saw the Asian lacquer displays at the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. She also wandered around Soho looking at shops. By chance she passed a furniture restoration shop on Dean Street belonging to Dean Charles.⁵ Offering her services to become a pupil, she was invited to study the materials of lacquer screens that he had been restoring. Charles was an Asian screen and furniture restorer and he used mostly European varnishes to repair the screens but had some varnish from China. When Gray returned from her art studies in Paris for a two-year spell in 1905 she resumed her education in lacquer from Dean Charles, and they remained friends for many years. She continued to ask his advice about colours and she also ordered supplies from him long after she had established herself as a reputable designer in Paris.⁶ ‘Lacquer always fascinated me’, Gray claimed many years later.⁷

It is not clear if Gray purchased the book A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, 1688 by John Stalker and George Parker, prior to her tutelage with Dean Charles or upon his recommendation, however this publication became important in her instruction. She readily stated that she always had an interest in lacquer. This seventeenth-century book became one of the main manuals on lacquer and japanning not only of that period but for generations afterwards.⁸ This publication had been extremely popular in England during the latter part of the seventeenth century, especially amongst women who were encouraged to learn Japanning as a pastime. The book was intended to assist not only amateur decorators, but also professional cabinetmakers. It contains instructions on the use of colours on Japanning and gilding, and the staining or varnishing of wood. The reader not only became a chemist familiarising themselves with proportions, ingredients, quantities and the reaction of chemical precipitates, but also an alchemist, transforming raw materials into textures, which when applied to an object created a work of art. It was similar to magic, appealing to the senses by touch, sight and smell. Wood stain could also turn vile substances into pure colours, almost like a magical art. For example Brazil wood had to be mixed in stale urine or water impregnated with pearl-ashes to produce a bright red colour. Pale red was obtained by dissolving an ounce of a red gum called dragon’s blood in a pint of spirit of wine and brushing over the wood with tincture, until the stain appears to be as strong as desired. The Treatise advocated the purchase of a wide selection of colours from druggist’s premises, or at that time from colour shops. Gray would eventually import all of her pigments from China. The colours which were popular in the manual included ivory black, lampblack, verdigris, umber, indigo or yellow ochre. The manual advocated the use of only the best varnish which also could be used for varnishing light colours such as white, yellow, green, sky, red, silver or gilded. A black ground was advocated, though grounds could also be, though rarely, white which in the seventeenth century imitated porcelain.

4.4 Lacquer samples, 1910s, wood, pigment, lacquer © NMI

Red lacquer was popular in the seventeenth century and Gray would avidly use it in her screens such as Le Destin (The Destiny) and domestic ware, placing it into a contemporary context. The technique as advocated in the Treatise consisted of applying coats of heavily pigmented coloured varnish that was initially blended with oil resin formulation, also known as spirit varnish, such as turpentine or essential oil, or with dissolved resin, such as seedlac, sandarac, copal, gum elemi, mastic, Venetian turpentine, gamboge or dragon’s blood. Each layer had to be polished and allowed to dry before applying the next coat of varnish. Successive coats had to contain less and less pigment. The last coats required the application of a final white or clear varnish.

The book also provided several sets of prints mainly flora and fauna designs where amateurs could incorporate or copy the patterns or simply cut them out and paste them on the surface of a Japanned object. Advice was given on how to add colour to these cut-out patterns using gold paint. There is one example which serves as the model for painting an exotic bird with a lustrous plumage and the authors instruct the reader on how to make the Japanned pattern shine with various shades of black, silver, gold and brown. To add extra brilliance to compositions, it was recommended to add speckles of gold on the designs, however, the reader was warned to use temperance and measure, to resist the temptation of creating absurd Chinoiserie compositions. Gray added these gold speckles on the bowls and plates of her domestic lacquer ware, albeit it in an extremely abstract and minimalist manner.

For Gray to expand her fine art skills into the medium of lacquer was not unusual. In England since the seventeenth century it was considered a natural progression in the arts. In the realm of female accomplishments painting was one of the master arts, and Japanning manuals such as the Treatise urged for a sound arrangement of designs.⁹ Lacquer was a sensuous material, engaging the craftsman’s hands, yet it was also an arduous craft. Upon her return to Paris in 1907 she took samples of the work with her and, through Charles’s contacts, was introduced to her lacquer mentor Seizo Sugawara (1884-1937), a young Japanese student in his twenties. Gray plunged into a medium that was unconventional and not widely used at all in Paris other than for restoration work. Gray in later years said that the French were suspicious of lacquer because it was too black, too dark and related to the dark arts.¹⁰ Despite lacquer being a difficult medium of expression it captured her imagination, challenging her and intriguing her. It was a very demanding process that required determination, dedication and hard work. She kept Charles’s recipe for lacquer, but Charles used Chinese lacquer which she imported and ordered from him in London but gradually through the influence of Sugawara she changed around to Japanese lacquer which she stated ‘The Chinese lacquer has more oil in it and is less resistant than the Japanese one, which is harder’.¹¹ Gray began ordering directly from a Japanese lacquer merchant Sugimoto Gosuke from Toyko.¹²

4.5 Seizo Sugawara, 1910s, black and white photograph © NMI

Following trips to Ireland and England, Gray finally settled permanently in Paris at the end of 1906 and took an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte in 1907. During this period the world of the decorative arts in France was in disarray. The rapid development of the German avant-garde design movement, exhibited at the Exposition Universelle, posed a threat to French design. In 1910 the Munich Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk held their first Paris exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. Largely employing wood, their simple designs were socially motivated, produced for moderate household budgets and addressed questions of industrial production.¹³ The German approach inspired a number of French designers, including Francis Jourdain (1876-1958) and Claude Roger Marx (1888-1977), who believed that, based on the example of Germany and England, one could produce low-cost affordable furniture for the masses. Gray embraced this liberal social philosophy. The Germans posed a threat suggesting a practical, democratic non-historicist approach, whereas the French by not embracing mass production hid behind the veneer of sumptuous interiors and outdated elitism. Indeed on 29 March the French newspaper Le Matin proclaimed that the French decorative arts were endangered by an imminent German invasion and as a result French critics assumed a defensive position.¹⁴ Gray felt an immediate affinity with their ideas.

In 1901 the Société Nationale des Artistes Décorateurs, a non-profit organisation, had been formed in France. Its aim was to promote French decorative arts, encouraging artists, craftsmen and designers to break from industrialists and work directly for the public under their own signature. They were insistent on elevating the status of the designer to the same level as that of artist. Gray joined and exhibited with them until 1925. Despite promoting modernity, French decorative arts relied heavily on luxury goods for an elitist clientele and did not consider changing to mass production. In France the emphasis on a nationalist approach to the decorative arts overlooked the developments of the Munich Werkstätten, and in the vacuum left from Art Nouveau there was a revival of eighteenth and nineteenth-century styles with garlands, swags and bouquet motifs and neo-classical references. This, combined with the charms of Orientalism and the exoticism of Les Ballet Russes and Diaghilev’s production of Schéhérazade in 1909, produced the repertoire of Art Deco which culminated in the 1925 Exposition des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.

With the initial help of Seizo Sugawara Gray was provided with further instruction, and the two remained as friends and in partnership for many years. They shared the same tools and workboxes, one of the tools even had the initials ‘G’ and ‘S’. Gray also kept Sugawara’s cabinet, his professional stamp and she kept a piece of his lacquer for herself.¹⁵ Sugawara was born in Sakata city in Yamagata Prefecture in North West Honshu on 29 January 1884.¹⁶ His early training was with a maker of Butsudan – traditional Buddhist shrines made in lacquer. He was apprenticed from an early age to a shrine maker in Jahoji.¹⁷ In 1905, at the age of twenty-one he was chosen to accompany Shoka Tsujimura (1867-1929) a professor in lacquer from the École des Beaux-Arts Tokyo to Paris.¹⁸ Tsujimura had been invited by the French government to teach the art of lacquer.¹⁹ Seizo Sugawara was one of Eileen Gray’s early lacquer teachers, but the exact date as to when they met still remains unclear.²⁰ Gray states in her personal notes that by 1908 she was working with a Japanese lacquer craftsman.²¹ Gray later stated of their meeting, ‘I was very glad when Sougawara (sic) who was lodging with some friends came to see me and we decided to start a workshop’.²²

4.6 Lacquer tools, 1910-1930, wood, metal, hair, pumice stone, pigment, polishing stones © NMI

The Japanese Pavilion left an indelible impression at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 where work from the Rimpa School, notably Ogata Korin (1658-1716), was on display.²³ The decision for Sugawara amongst other Japanese lacquer craftsmen to leave Japan for Europe at the time was an indication of how difficult it was to pursue this traditional craft as a career in his native homeland. With the emergence of Art Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 the École des Beaux-Arts in Tokyo amongst other schools set up decorative arts departments which permitted artisans like Tsujimura to work in workshops in Paris such as the atelier Gaillard.²⁴ Some artisans worked in appalling conditions; many returned home, others received government grants for the duration of their stay in Paris. For those who settled in Paris, like Sugawara, they appeared to have lived in the district around rue de Théatre.²⁵

Sugawara and Gray formed a very successful partnership. Initially working out of her apartment, they finally opened a workshop in 1910 on the rue Guénégaud where they produced lacquer work.²⁶ He became Gray’s mentor, teaching her this technique, and after she had mastered the art to perfection, he continued to appear on her payroll for lacquer work.

Sugawara was an important lacquer artist in his own right. Jean Dunand (1877-1942), the renowned French lacquer artist who had first met Gray in 1908, came to study under Sugawara after Gray made the initial introduction. Dunand first met Sugawara on 18 February 1912.²⁷ Sugawara had an interest in the dinanderie work of Dunand and they initiated each other into their respective techniques. The first lesson took place on 16 May 1912 and was followed by twelve more, running to July. Gray remained in contact with Dunand and his son Bernard (1908-1998), who would become one of the most important designers from the Art Deco period.

Lacquer, though it has a remarkable lustrous finish, requires a painstaking method of production. True lacquer is a resin drawn from the Rhus vernicifera, peculiar to China and Japan. In its natural state, once it is filtered from its impurities, it forms a dense liquid which when exposed to oxygen under humid conditions dries slowly to form a hard, impermeable surface. The liquid resin is mixed with powdered stone and then Gray usually applied thin layers onto a wood base. The wood had to be smoothed down with a pumice stone and then the grain was filled in. Then the top is concealed with fine silk or hemp which is pasted on with rice gum. To achieve the required result of a lustrous finish usually twenty to thirty coats had to be applied and each layer took several days to dry. Then they were pumiced over again before the next application. Each of these coats had to be applied in a dust-free environment. The drying process took two to four days and initially the most suitable environment she found was her own bathroom.²⁸ In her notebook she recorded that ‘when lacquer has been left some time before applying a fresh coat or relief always clean well by rubbing over with – for black and solid grounds – charcoal powder and water – for delicate grounds tomoko (a type of Japanese clay) and water’.²⁹

Lacquer dries to a rich, dark brown colour when left to dry in its natural form. Yet Gray experimented with natural pigments producing black, brown and brilliant orange and red variations.³⁰ At one point she experimented with the use of cigarette paper instead of gold or silver leaf.³¹ Each of her experiments in colours, materials and techniques she meticulously began to record in a notebook on lacquer which she used for nearly twenty-five years.³² On how to achieve a rough surface and to give lacquer texture she noted, ‘To make a rugged surface in lacquer give a coat of transparent lacquer and on to it drop grains of the powder of colour chosen, wait about three hours and then cover the whole surface with powder brushing it backwards and forwards about three or more times at intervals of a few hours. Leave it dry about two or three days then wash over with sponge and water to wash off sulphurous powder, dry with very fine rag, when perfectly dry give sesame with colour wood’.³³ She learnt the entire process with a lot of patience and when mistakes were made, especially if she applied too much lacquer, it rippled or cracked and she began all over again. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870-1943) observed Gray working and wrote, ‘The slightest error forces her to abandon her work and start anew. An assiduous labour. What a paradox in our frenetic times’.³⁴

Many of the entries in Gray’s lacquer notebook are undated and read like recipes, making them difficult to read but it gives much insight into the laborious and admirable nature of her task and her technique. Gray was the first lacquer artist to successfully achieve the colour blue. Initially her experimentations produced a blue which when dried had a green hue which she disliked. When attempting to achieve this colour she contacted Charles’s workshop in London and was given clear directions. Gray later achieved a new and improved recipe. ‘For blue ground use common ultramarine, add a little chrome green or crimson lake according to the amount required’.³⁵ As Gray’s technique improved the use of other colours did not elude her and she explored the development of yellow, cinnabar and the colour white.

While Gray’s innovativeness is for the large areas of undecorated lacquer, she also recorded in her notebook her achievements in metallic relief, inlaying mother of pearl, eggshell, gilding with both gold and silver and how to incise decoration onto panels. Her research would have been endless if it had not been for the regrettable difficulties in the length of time it took to import lacquer and the fact also that she had hoped to produce for a mass market. In his article in L’Amour de l’art Vauxcelles gave much insight into Gray’s methodology. ‘In the field of the applied arts talent is nothing without professionalism...Eileen Gray knows this. She works with a wise slow method for herself’. He continued, ‘She joins oils to the ordinary varnish, iron sulphate, rice vinegar, then the colours, black, yellow, aventurine, red. She then measures out carefully the gum, black animal dye, tea oil, pork bile, cinnabar, cochineal, coromandel, orpiment. This is the reason for her subdued tones, like the night covered in stars, and the lacquer work of our Irishwoman is encrusted with mother of pearl, coral, semi-precious stones, lapis lazuli, all in harmony with the material and the theme’.³⁶

4.7 Hamanaka’s signature and ideogram signature in coral-red lacquer, detail on sofa, 1935, black lacquer, dyed black rubbed shagreen, wood, coral pigment © Galerie Dutko

Her partnership with Sugawara expanded into a workshop in 1910 at the rue Guénégaud when Gray’s apartment became too cluttered with material. Sugawara also produced sculptural heads which Gray exhibited at Jean Désert. Their working relationship lasted from 1908-1930, after which Gray closed her shop in rue Faubourg St Honoré. Through Sugawara, Gray was introduced to other craftsmen, Ousouda, Kichizo Inagaki (1876-1951), who worked for Rodin, and Katsu Hamanaka (1895-1982), who was a pupil of Sugawara and became a famous lacquer craftsman in Europe from the beginning of the 1930s. Gray kept a Christmas card from Hamanaka after their initial meeting.³⁷

In his own atelier Sugawara employed up to twenty artisans and married one of the polishing assistants.³⁸ When Gray closed her decorating shop Jean Désert, Sugawara took charge of the Rothschild Collection at Cernay-la-Ville. The Rothschilds were clients of Gray’s. He also did work for the artist, writer and Art Deco designer Eyre de Lanux (1894-1996) and Evelyn Wyld (1882-1973) when they opened a decorator’s shop in Cannes. Wyld and Gray had formed a very successful weaving workshop in the rue de Visconti and had remained friends for many years. Sugawara remained in France until his death on 12 April 1937.³⁹

Gray worked with and depended on a number of these Japanese artisans and craftsmen for her commissions. Some were employed for particular tasks and Gray kept records of these.⁴⁰ The names which appeared frequently in her ledgers are Inagaki and Ousouda.⁴¹ Between 1912- 1921 Inagaki corresponded and invoiced Gray regarding various items of furniture, handles, Cubist-style lamps and lamp-shades and produced pieces for various commissions, notably some of the work for Mme Mathieu-Lévy’s Rue de Lota apartment. These notes, invoices and letters give much insight into the materials she used such as parchment, ostrich eggs and ivory and the techniques she employed such as scorching wood and then sanding it down to add to the textures and variety to her pieces. Gray also kept the business cards and details of various craftsmen, suppliers and workshops where she could purchase necessary items suitable to her trade.⁴² Any materials which weren’t used by these craftsmen Gray kept – often experimenting with them as sculpture – which is what she did in November 1916 with leftover ivory handles for a piece of furniture.⁴³

4.8 A three-panelled black lacquered and gold leaf screen, black lacquered back, Katsu Hamanaka, 1930s, wood, black lacquer, gold leaf © Galerie Dutko

From 1908 onwards Gray began to produce small lacquer pieces but she said that in 1910 she began to produce screens.⁴⁴ Indeed her first object she completed in lacquer was a screen.⁴⁵ This continued into lacquer panels and furniture ranging from chairs, tables, bureaus, beds and dressing tables. Soon she expanded into domestic pieces, bowls, plates, toiletries. Her first screen which she produced in blue lacquer inlaid with mother of pearl was a large four-panel screen produced for a friend Florence Gardiner in 1912 and was called La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way).⁴⁶

4.9 La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way) four-panelled screen, 1912, wood, blue and natural lacquer, engraved, raised colours, mother of pearl inlay © NMI

It was reproduced in Vogue magazine in 1917 illustrating an abstract nude figure running over a mountain, a trail of constellations of stars extends across the night’s sky, emitting from the figure’s head.⁴⁷ It was also illustrated in the Dutch magazine Wendigen in 1924.⁴⁸ The work has now disappeared but it was described in the French magazine Les Feuillets d’Art by the Duchess Clermont-Tonnerre saying it depicted ‘The dust haze of the Milky Way, made from mother of pearl thrown over the matt of the lacquered leaves of the screen’.⁴⁹ At the eighth Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1913 Gray exhibited two lacquer panels, a yellow and silver panel for a library, a door panel and a frieze. The first was a blue lacquer panel, Le Magician de la Nuit (The Magician of the Night), 1912-13, which attracted considerable attention.⁵⁰ The second panel was entitled Om Mani Padme Hum, 1912-13.⁵¹ A critic in Art et Décoration stated after seeing her display that, ‘Miss Gray uses that admirable material lacquer... Seeing her entries one regrets that this beautiful technique is not more favoured by our decorators’.⁵²

As with many of her lacquer screens and panels the subject matter is compelling and mysterious. The author from Vogue magazine asked ‘What is the mystery which impels?’⁵³ There is a spiritual, enchanting quality to the stories Gray depicts in many of her lacquer panels and screens, evident in the names. Inspired by the contemporary art movements such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, the subject matter for these pieces is derived from books in her library on mythology (Greek, Persian, Indian and Irish Celtic), poetry, psychology and philosophy.