JAPANESE LACQUERS
CASAL, Ugo Alfonso.
A small archive of letters, photographs, and typescript material on his collection of Japanese lacquers.
[Japan and California, 1930–1955.]
Black card album (290 x 225 mm) by Smead secured with three brass fasteners; covers slightly creased and worn, autograph letter lightly creased, slight toning and a few small marginal chips to typescript collection inventory; otherwise very good.
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A small archive of letters, photographs, and typescript material on his collection of Japanese lacquers.
A fascinating archive relating to the extensive Japanese lacquer collection of the Swiss–Japanese banker Ugo Alfonso Casal, including photographs, a 5370-item inventory of his collection, and several lectures on the history and production techniques of Japanese lacquerware.
After studying in Rome and Neuenberg, Casal (1888–1964) began working in Kobe as a representative of the Swiss merchant company Volkart Brothers; he would remain in Kobe for some fifty years, where he wrote extensively on Japanese lacquerware as well as folklore, contributing to Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Asiatische Studien, Folklore Studies, the journal of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, and Monumenta Nipponica, and amassed an important collection of lacquer boxes and other objects, including inro, nearly a thousand netsuke, and some 250 pipe cases; c. 4000 items from his collection, dating largely from the Edo period to the Meiji and Taisho periods, are now held at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. The present archive includes a 1941 letter to the Japanologist P.D. Perkins enclosing a copy of his inventory, and thanking him for the opportunity to meet him and his wife in California, as well as pocket-sized printed copies of lectures on lacquers he gave in Kobe and Kyoto in the 1930s.
Provenance: the California booksellers and Japanologists P.D. and Ione Perkins (née Bendel). Percival Densmore Perkins (1897–1963), author of The Paper Industry and Printing in Japan (1940), taught Japanese at the University of Southern California and English at the University of Kyoto; P.D. and his wife Ione operated Perkins Oriental Bookstore in South Pasadena, specialising in books on East Asia, collaborating in 1934 on a bibliography of the Irish–Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn, who had been instrumental in introducing Japanese literature and culture to the West in the 1890s; they co-published a Kanji dictionary in 1942.
Comprising:
CASAL, Ugo Alfonso. Autograph letter signed to ‘Mr Perkins’. San Francisco, 27 February 1941. 2 pp. on headed paper from the Hotel Bellevue in San Francisco; slight creasing, but very good. Thanking Perkins for the opportunity to meet him and his wife and enclosing a copy of the inventory of his collection, originally drawn up for insurance purposes. ‘The rhinoceros horn I may have to sell in Japan’, he writes, ‘as I gave a friend first refusal just before I left’.
—. Japanese Art Lacquere [sic]. Introductory lecture given with a small private Exhibition held under the Auspices of the KANSAI ASIATIC SOCIETY at the Osaka City Fine Arts Museum, Tennoji … Osaka, 3 December 1955. Carbon typescript, ff. [1], 15, with a carbon copy of the same.
[PHOTOGRAPHS.] 17 large gelatin silver prints (c. 210 x 280 mm), versos with purple ink stamp ‘U.A. Casal. Post Office Box 343, Kobe’, 7 versos labelled by Casal in German in ink; [and:] a further 19 prints (6 of which c. 120 x 90 mm and 13 of which c. 120 x 70 mm) versos with Casal’s purple ink stamp and labelled by him in German or English; within a manila envelope (210 x 240 mm).
CASAL, Ugo Alfonso. Some notes on Japanese Gold Lacquers. Lecture delivered at Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai … Kyoto, 1938. 12mo, pp. 22, [2 (blank)]; stapled as issued in the original printed wrappers; inner cover inscribed ‘To Mr PD Perkins, with compliments’, ownership inscription of Ione B. Perkins to front cover.
—. Japanese Lacquers. Kobe, 11 March 1930. 12mo, pp. 33; stapled as issued in the original printed wrappers; inner cover inscribed ‘with compliments’ by the author, ownership inscription of Ione B. Perkins to front cover.
Carbon copy of Casal’s inventory, divided into two segments: ‘Collection U.A. Casal – Objects of Art over 100 years old’ and ‘Objects of Art later than A.D. 1830’, pp. 65; pp. XXXI; comprising 5370 items in total.
See ‘Ugo Casal’, in Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens (online).
