Provenance
Probably purchased by Lord Charles Stuart de Rothesay (1779-1845), for his collection at Highcliffe Castle, which was constructed between 1830 and 1834; inherited by his wife Lady Elizabeth Stuart de Rothesay (1789-1867); inherited by their daughter Lady Louisa Waterford (1818-1891); acquired by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839-1898) for Waddesdon Manor possibly in 1890; inherited by Alice de Rothschild (1847-1922); inherited by James de Rothschild (1878-1957); bequeathed by James de Rothschild to the National Trust in 1957.
Essential Literature
Geoffrey de Bellaigue, ‘French Lean-to Secretaire’, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Furniture, Clocks and Gilt Bronzes, 2 vols (Office du Livre, 1974), I, pp. 282-5, no. 62; Arlen Higinbotham et al., ‘Secretaire’, in Gillian Wilson and Arlen Heginbotham (eds), French Rococo Ébenisterie in the J. Paul Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2021), pp. 178-88, no. 13.
Jacques Dubois, maître-ébéniste (1742-63)
French lean-to secretaire
About 1750
Stamped (right-hand rail): DUBOIS, JME (fig. 1)
Oak, pine, tulipwood, kingwood, purplewood, mahogany, Japanese lacquer, gilt bronze, white metal, green Morrocco leather
88.5 × 52.4 × 40 cm
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (no. 2435)
Lacquer luxe: East-West surface encounters
Lacquer luxe, as a composite word, combines the reference to material goods, lacquerware, and a decorative craft method, lacquering, with a term related to luxury. I have adopted this term from the contemporary beauty industry which often combines both these words to refer to products that provide intense colour, glossy finish and are aimed at the high end of the market.[1] The term is apt in relation to antique lacquerware which can range in scale from small decorative pieces, such as bowls, to larger pieces of furniture, such as folding screens.
Japan House in Los Angeles held an exhibition between July 2023 to January 2024: ‘Pokémon X Kogei. Playful Encounters of Pokémon and Japanese Craft’. The exhibition brought together two aspects of Japanese culture: one admired for centuries, Kogei (traditional arts and crafts) – in lacquer, ceramics, textiles, and other media – and their more recent successful export, the globally popular Pokémon brand in the form of video games and apps, trading cards, animated television shows, and other merchandise.[2] One of the items that encapsulated the theme of the exhibition was a lacquer tea caddy, Call Spring, by contemporary lacquer master Yoshiaki Taguchi, featuring Moltres, the legendary bird Pokémon which controls fire and heralds Spring (fig. 1). In my twenties I was captivated by Pokémon trading cards. Collecting them filled me with wonder, particularly those illustrated with fantastic creatures that bore a vague resemblance to the natural world of plants, animals and minerals. In due course, I stopped collecting but passed on my collector folders to my nephew and, whilst I can still identify the early Pokémon species, such as my favourite Pikachu, I rely on him for updates on the current franchise. We have both, in our own ways, been entranced by an expression of Japanese aesthetics and, in this way, we join a long line of Japanophiles.
Figure 1. Yoshiaki Taguchi (1958- ), Call Spring (Tea Caddy), 2022, Urushi lacquer, Makie. 8.1 cm × 7.2 cm, Private Collection.
To understand the influence of Asia on Western decorative arts, two terms are often used: Chinoiserie, a style which emerged in the late seventeenth century but, it could be argued, had its zenith in the eighteenth century and has been long-lived, and Japonaiserie, a term coined by the brothers Jules de Goncourt (1830-1879) and Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) to describe a similar phenomenon in the nineteenth century.[3] The first style did not distinguish between the Asian nations and combined motifs from India, China and Japan to create an exotic fantasy realm that was far away, whereas the second emerged when Japan reopened in 1853 for trade with the West after centuries of seclusion. A third term used is Japonisme which describes European borrowings from Japanese aesthetics.[4]
From the seventeenth century, Europeans started to respond to the importation of Asian luxuries, such as porcelain, lacquerware and textiles, by learning from these decorative objects and imitating them to stimulate local production. Asia was ahead in the technologies involved in making these luxury products, but the Europeans could not bring back this knowledge so the desire to make substitute Asian luxuries in Europe can be seen as generating the discovery of new materials locally, developing manufacturing skills and growing the consumer market for luxury goods.[5]
Figure 2. Jacques Dubois, maître-ébéniste (1694-1763), French Lean-to Secretaire, c. 1750, oak, pine, tulipwood, kingwood, purplewood, mahogany, Japanese lacquer, gilt bronze, white metal, green Morrocco leather, 88.5 × 52.4 × 40 cm, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (no. 2435).
Asian lacquer is known as urushi. It is a natural plastic, like turtle shell, that is extracted from the sap of the Rhus vernicifera, or Lacquer tree, in Japan. Various surface techniques are used in the manufacture of urushi ware, either singly or combined: carved, incised, inlaid, sprinkled, painted, dry, moulded and gilt.[6] Layers of urushi are applied, and they polymerise in reaction to the environment, hardening and becoming water proof. In between applications, the upper layer is polished to create an even and reflective surface. Towards the final stages, outlines of designs are transferred and these are filled with metallic powders, gold and silver, and sometimes mother-of-pearl in the sprinkled or Makie type.[7] This particular type is a millennia-old decorative lacquer art that is still made in contemporary Japan.[8] It was the importation of Makie objects, with their opulent beauty of shiny black and gold, that dominated the French court taste. The reception at Versailles of the ambassadors of Siam in 1686 during the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) can be argued to mark the beginning of the French court’s interest in the Far East. One of the hundreds of Siamese diplomatic gifts was a Japanese Makie lacquer cabinet that the monarch gifted to the Grand Dauphin. As Elizabeth Benjamin notes, ‘these gifts were only occasionally products of Siam, but instead reflected the kingdom’s well-established trade networks with India, Persia, Japan, and China’.[9] This desire for Makie lacquer continued though the eighteenth century; Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-1793) inherited the collection of Japanese lacquer from her mother, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780). Marie Antoinette had one of her private rooms in the Palace of Versailles, the cabinet doré (gilt room), redecorated in 1784 to showcase this precious collection.[10]
Europeans who sought to replicate the surface aesthetics of Asian lacquer experimented with a wide range of plant resins and oils. In England this imitative approach was known as ‘japanning’. This term does not only mean the art of varnishing as a technique, it also carries an association with exoticism typical of chinoiserie which, we will see, provides a fantasy of the East, be it India, China or Japan, packaged for consumption in the West.[11] In this quest to produce European imitation lacquer, many different formulations were developed, but one of the most superior oil-resin varnishes was created by the Martin brothers, Parisian vernisseurs (varnishers) for two generations (1730-1770).[12] Due to their success in creating a high-quality lacquer finish, the term vernis Martin (Martin varnish) is used in France to describe the technique whether the brothers’ workshop was involved or not in crafting the piece of furniture.[13] Whereas the dominant aesthetic in Makie lacquer is a reflective black surface predominantly decorated with gold (fig. 2), vernis Martin objects play with a much broader colour palette (fig. 3). Two notable examples are displayed in Parisian museums: the panels that once decorated the Chinese cabinet in the Paris townhouse of Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (1696-1788) – a rare survival of green japanning – at the Musée Carnavalet (fig. 4), and the chest of drawers delivered by Mathieu Criaerd (1689-1776) to Madame de Mailly (1717-1744), inspired by the blue and white of imported Asian porcelain, now at the Musée du Louvre (fig. 5).
Figure 3. Adrien Faizelot-Delorme (1691-1768) (attr.), French Lean-to Secretaire, about 1750, oak, walnut, pine, kingwood, purplewood, vernis Martin, gilt bronze, brass, 87.8 × 58.8 × 43 cm, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (no. 2434).
Both Japanese and European lacquer help us to understand the appeal of two lean-to secretaires, or writing desks, that are in the Small Library at Waddesdon Manor. They were both made in the mid-eighteenth century. Ferdinand de Rothschild acquired the one made in the workshop of Jacques Dubois (1694-1763) in the late nineteenth century when the fascination for Asian aesthetic still held visual appeal (fig. 2). It incorporates seventeenth-century Japanese lacquer panels.[14] James de Rothschild (1878-1957), who inherited Waddesdon Manor in 1922, received the one attributed to Adrien Faizelot-Delorme (1722-1791) from the estate of Edmond James de Rothschild (1845-1934), his father (fig. 3). It is a fine example of European lacquer imitating the sumptuous surface of Asian lacquer but expressing classical themes from the Western canon.[15]
They are similar in shape, both having cabriole legs, both decorated with bronze mounts, and in each the lean-to panel opens to provide a writing surface and reveal multiple drawers to hold writing materials, paper and correspondence. Whilst they both come from named and known workshops, both are the product of more than one pair of hands. Many craftsmen with their gild-regulated specialties such as cabinet-makers and bronze makers, in addition to the original Japanese lacquer artisans, contributed to make these pieces of furniture. However, these details aside, what does each piece of furniture tell us about lacquer luxe and the surfaces that are produced out of encounters between East and West?
Figure 4. One of the panels that once decorated the Chinese cabinet in the Paris townhouse of Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (1696-1788) – a rare survival of green japanning, Musée Carnavalet, Paris (BO102/5).
The secretaire from the workshop of Dubois incorporates older Japanese lacquer panels with scenes representing nature: geese amid bamboo, water plants and rocks in a lake; domestic dwellings at the foot of mountains, and more houses on the margins of a lake. These panels would initially have formed part of a different piece of furniture, possibly a screen or a box, procured by the French marchand mercier, dismantled at some stage and recycled into a piece that was more in keeping with eighteenth-century French taste and use. Contemporary Western admirers of this secretaire would have enjoyed the luxuriousness of the gold decoration, with motifs such as the geese and the dwellings built up in moulded relief upon the black background to create an exotic rural landscape. However, they likely would have missed the original references to Japanese literary traditions. Barbara Brennan Ford observes that lacquer pieces of the period had links to ‘the poetic imagery of the Konshisū’, the earliest Imperial anthology of poetry, reflecting ‘a literary tradition in which intimately observed seasonal manifestations of nature are used as metaphors for human amotion’.[16] In Europe, Japanese culture remained an enigma at that time, and the depth of Japanese upper-class learning would have been lost on European admirers of the surface decoration.
Although the secretaire from the workshop of Faizelot-Delorme owes a debt to the importation of Asian lacquerware due to its imitation of the sumptuous polished surface, the subjects depicted belong to the European tradition (fig. 3). Upon the gold ground, there are polychrome coloured scenes: framed with garlands, four show children playing; one is an allegorical group that may have links to the writings of Plutarch (about AD 40-120s); and one presents a bouquet of poppies.[17] The polychromatic range of colours – red, blue, green, yellow, pink, purple – although commonly used in vernis Martin are absent from the imported Asian pieces.[18] It has been speculated that the children at play derive from engravings by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636-1697).[19] Contemporary European viewers of the piece, well-versed in classical mythology, would have understood the symbolism of the female figure pressing a ring to the mouth of the winged putto holding an open letter as asking him to keep the secrets held in this writing desk. Unlike the Dubois secretaire, this one was fully legible to those who, given their European classical education, could appreciate the playful visual references.
Figure 5. Mathieu Criaerd (1689-1776), Commode en vernis Martin, 1742, oak, fruit tree wood, bronze (silvered), marble, vernis Martin, 85 × 132 × 63.8 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA 11292).
To conclude, both these secretaires located in the Small Library at Waddesdon Manor are the result of a passion for lacquer luxe which emerged in the seventeenth century from the encounters between East and West. The storm of the French Revolution dispersed a myriad of objects, including many examples of Asian and European lacquer, and these secretaires came to be placed in the Small Library at Waddesdon Manor after passing through other collectors’ homes: the Dubois secretaire left France at some point in the early nineteenth century to join the collection at Highcliffe Castle until its arrival at Waddesdon Manor in about 1890.[20] The provenance of the vernis Martin secretaire is less clear-cut, although we do know that before it joined James de Rothschild’s collection at Waddesdon, it was in the Salon des Boucher in his parents' chateau in Boulogne. Whilst there are many pieces at Waddesdon Manor that can be understood to be linked to the Western obsession for Asian-inspired goods and the wide-spread fashion for Chinoiseries – in the porcelain collections for example – Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild acquired the lacquer luxe secretaire by Dubois as part of the revival of the taste for French eighteenth-century decorative arts and their associations with the vanished courtly society of Versailles.[21]
[1] See for example Tom Ford Beauty’s product Lip Lacquer Luxe and Sassy Cow Co’s Luxe Lacquer nail gel polish.
[2] Pokémon X Kogei. Playful Encounters of Pokémon and Japanese Craft (exhibition held at Japan House, Los Angeles, 25 July 2023 – 7 January 2024).
[3] Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel, and nineteenth-century century Japan (Routledge, Curzon, 2003), p. 2; Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. 2 (Editions Robert Laffont, 1989), pp. 178-9 (October 29, 1868).
[4] See ‘Chinoiserie – an introduction’, V&A Museum website [Accessed 05-02 2026]; ‘Japonisme’, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art [Accessed 05-02-2026]; Richard Hayman, Chinoiserie (Bloomsbury, 2021); Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Emery, Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
[5] Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 182 (2004), pp. 85-142.
[6] Frank Minney, L. A. O’Neil, Oliver Impey and Nicholas Umney, ‘Lacquer’, in Grove Art Online, 2009.
[7] Christine M. E. Guth, ‘Layering: Materiality, Time and Touch in Japanese Lacquer’, in Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley (eds), Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects (Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 33-44 (p. 36).
[8] Gold – Makie in modernizing Japan (exhibition held at Moa Museum of Art, Atami, Japan, 13 September 2024 – 28 October 2024).
[9] Elizabeth Benjamin, ‘Lacquer Cabinet’, in Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (eds), Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), p. 157, no. 66.
[10] A Queen’s Treasure from Versailles: Marie-Antoinette’s Japanese Lacquer (exhibition held at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 23 January 2018 – 5 January 2019).
[11] Chi-Ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England (John Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 109-11.
[12] Anne Foray-Carlier and Monica Koplin (eds), Les secrets de la laque française: Le vernis Martin (Les Arts Décoratifs, 2014).
[13] Jessica Chasen, Arlen Heginbotham and Michael Schilling, ‘The Analysis of East Asian and European Lacquer Surfaces on Rococo Furniture’, in Gillian Wilson and Arlen Heginbotham (eds), French Rococo Ébénisterie in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Getty Publications, 2021), pp. 9-16.
[14] Geoffrey de Bellaigue, ‘French Lean-to Secretaire’, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Furniture, Clocks and Gilt Bronzes, 2 vols (Office du Livre, 1974), I, pp. 282-5, no. 62.
[15] Ibid., ‘French Lean-to Secretaire’, pp. 278-81, no. 61.
[16] Barbara Brennan Ford, ‘Japanese lacquer: Makie and Negoro’, in James C. Y. Watt and Barbara Brennan Ford (eds), East Asian Lacquer: The Florence and Herbert Irving Collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), pp. 153-61 (p. 156).
[17] De Bellaigue, The James A. de Rothschild, p. 280.
[18] Anne-Solenn Le Hô, and others, ‘French Lacquers of the 18th Century and Vernis Martin’, ICOM-CC Conference, September 2014, Melbourne, Australia. Hal-01279161 [Accessed 05-02-2026].
[19] De Bellaigue, The James A. de Rothschild, p. 280.
[20] Ibid., The James A. de Rothschild, p. 285.
[21] The Waddesdon Archive at Windmill Hill, Acc. no. 177.1997, Ferdinand de Rothschild, Reminiscences, 1897, p. 65.